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Chapter 2 A survey of theories of the family
Abstract
Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of the theories of the family, and discusses the household technology and utility possibility frontiers, decision-making in the family, theories of the marriage and household membership, and interdependent preferences within families. An important conceptual building block for economic theories of marriage is the utility possibility frontier that any couple would face, if they were to marry each other. It is a consequence of the second fundamental theorem of welfare economics that if preferences are convex and there are no consumption externalities, then any household that allocates marketable private goods among its members will act as if each household member is given a personal income and is allowed to spend it as he or she wishes. Although the problem of benefit–cost analysis of household public goods in benevolent families seems interesting and important, it does not seem to have received much attention in the literature.
... The literature on CBA dealing with public marginal risk reductions agrees that values driven by paternalistic altruism should be counted but not values driven by pure (nonpaternalistic ) altruism to avoid double counting (Bergstrom 2006; Quiggin 1997; Jones- Lee 1992). When altruism is restricted to mortality improvements within a household (sharing a common wealth), three types of behaviour are relevant (Chanel, Luchini, and Shogren 2005): pure self-interest (with no concern for other members), pure (paternalistic or non-paternalistic) altruism (with a similar weight for every member) and safety-oriented-altruism (with non-similar weights for members). ...
... The survival of every member of the household is thus considered as a household public good (Bergstrom 1997). Note that we do not address the issue of intra-household allocation , because one member decides for the household, taking into account her household's budget. ...
We extend the individual dynamic model of lifetime resource allocation to assess the monetary value given to the increase in survival probabilities for every member of a household induced by improved air quality. We interpret this monetary value as VPF (value of a prevented fatality), which can also be expressed as a flow of discounted VOLY (value of life years) lost, and account for potential altruism towards other household members. We use a French air pollution contingent valuation survey that provides a description of the life-length reduction implied by a change in air pollution exposure. By privatising the public commodity air pollution, we succeed in ruling out any form of altruism (towards others living today and towards future generations) except altruism towards one's family. We estimate a mean VOLY of €2001140,000, a 30% premium for VOLY in perfect health w.r.t. average expected health status, and a mean VPF of €20011.45 million for the respondent, all context-specific. In addition, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship between his/her age and VOLY/VPF, and significant benevolence only towards children under 18.
... Ebben a felfogásban a háztartás nem különbözik érdemben a standard mikroökonómia többi szereplőjétől: döntéseit egyszemélyben hozza, amivel célja, hogy a költségvetési korlátja mellett maximalizálja a hasznossági függvényét (lásd például Browning et al. 2014, Deaton-Muellbauer 2009. A háztartás tehát egy fogyasztási egységként funkcionál, amelyre a közgazdaságtan -hasonlóan a vállalatok neoklasszikus felfogásához -fekete dobozként tekint: belső struktúrájával nem foglalkozik, s csak a külső kapcsolatai képezik vizsgálat tárgyát (Bergstrom 1997, Deaton 1997, Donni-Ponthieux 2011. Sen (1984) megfogalmazásában ezek a modellek úgy kezelik a családot, mintha annak tagjait egyszerűen csak összetapasztották volna. ...
Jelen tanulmány a család közgazdaságtanáról ad áttekintést, bemutatva, hogy a különböző közgazdaság-tudományi megközelítések miként tekintenek a családra, s miben látják annak funkcióját. Először a háztartások feketedoboz-modelljét vázoljuk fel, amely egy egyszemélyi döntéshozóként működő fogyasztási egységként tekint a családra. Ezután a családot kollektív döntéshozóként kezelő neoklasszikus irányzatra térünk rá, amelyben már a háztartáson belüli optimális erőforrás-allokáció kérdése kerül a középpontba. Végül, de nem utolsósorban a családra szerződésként, a tranzakciók irányítási struktúrájaként tekintő intézményi közgazdaságtani megközelítés alapvetéseit ismertetjük. Az áttekintés során kitérünk az egyes modellek hiányosságaira, továbbá arra is, hogy az újabb megközelítések miben lépnek túl a megelőzőkön s mivel egészítik ki azokat.
... In the early 1980s, motivated by the work of Gary Becker (Becker, 1991), several approaches were developed to analyze the intrahousehold decision process. A variety of models emerged, viewing household processes as cooperative games (Bargain & Moreau, 2013;Manser & Brown, 1980;McElroy & Horney, 1981), non-cooperative games (Bergstrom, 1997;Lundberg & Pollak, 1994), independent individual models (Grossbard-Shechtman, 1984), and household social welfare programs (Chiappori, 1988(Chiappori, , 1992. Among these, a number of empirical applications rely on the so-called "collective" model, first proposed by Chiappori (1988Chiappori ( , 1992. ...
This paper analyzes the intrahousehold bargaining power of spouses in Spanish families, in a collective framework. We estimate household labor supply equations and, under certain testable restrictions, we obtain a theoretically derived sharing rule for household income, which characterizes intrahousehold bargaining power. Then, using unique data on decision-making in the household, we construct Pareto weights, and study the validity of the collective model by comparing the theoretical sharing rule and the constructed Pareto weight. The results reveal that both the observed Pareto weight and the theoretical sharing rule display qualitative similarities, thus providing direct empirical support to the collective model. Furthermore, the results suggest that Spanish wives behave more altruistically, while husbands behave more egoistically. This should be taken into account by policy makers and researchers when analyzing inequality in the household, and contemplating specific policies affecting the household.
... Under budget constraints that describe the total resources available to them, they must decide how much of their time each family member spends on market work (thereby generating income to be used on market goods), and how much time each member spends on other productive activities in the home. This framework allows for a great variety of models, used to explain a great variety of families' choices regarding the production of various commodities of interest under different circumstances (see Bergstrom, 1997; for a broad overview). ...
We review the empirical literature on the causal effects of welfare‐to‐work policies on the employment of low‐income parents and the intergenerational impacts on their children. We focus on welfare policies that change benefit levels, activity requirements, time limits, and in‐work benefits. These policies may affect children through several mechanisms, including changes in family income, time spent with parents, and attitudes towards work or welfare. To unpack these mechanisms and understand the net effects of these policies, we assess how the impact on children varies across outcomes, home environments and institutional settings. Overall, the literature shows that income tax credits are an attractive policy, simultaneously increasing employment and improving child development outcomes. In contrast, other policies that boost employment either have no or negative impacts on child development.
... The extension of the family decision-making model is known as the household behavior model which extensively uses the Cournot-Nash Equilibrium model. There are many modeling approaches in family decision-making such as a) cooperative bargaining and b) non-cooperative bargaining[28][29][30][31][32][33][34].Nicosia Model of Consumer Decision-making: This model deals with the level of exposure a consumer gets concerning the purchase decision. This model is based on four attributes such that the output of one field acts as the input of the second field and so on. ...
Though consumer communication and orientation is a collective responsibility of all the departments/functions across the organization, a majority of lifestyle brands and retailers in India believe that the consumer communication is the deliverable of a single department/function that is widely and erroneously tagged as Marketing Department. This belief is distracting them from understanding the long-term positive impact on consumer patronage and they continue to use high-cost advertisements as one of the major tactics for consumer communication. A single theory, model and framework of consumer behavior from the existing literature available across perspectives, paradigms, and areas of study (Economics, Behavioral Economics, Psychology, Social Psychology, Anthropology, Marketing and so on) is not entirely applicable that could be adopted to suit lifestyle brands/retailers in India and designing a framework without empirical pieces of evidence is also not appropriate. In this study, i) we have studied over 28 consumer behavior theories, models and frameworks; ii) analyzed 24 months' of actual data of a few select organized lifestyle brands and retailers in India; iii) borrowed experimental findings and insights from previous studies relevant in this context, to identify 50 factors influencing the outcomes of each stage of the consumer decision-making process and selected a few of them that have indicated the high scope of influencing capability by a lifestyle brand/retailer to design an economical and effective framework that is useful in designing consumer communication deployment tactics by a lifestyle brand or retailer in India. The framework is named as CCF-LS.
... The theoretical literature on who marries whom treats marriage as a voluntary arrangement between men and women (see Bergstrom 1997, Mortenson 1988 and Weiss 1977 for surveys of the literature on marriage, matching and economics of the family). It is natural, then, for economists to analyze the assignment of partners within a market framework (Becker 1991; Gale and Shapley 1962). ...
This paper constructs an empirical model of spouse selection based on Becker's efficient marriage market hypothesis to examine how equilibrium sorting takes place in marriage markets in India. It finds that education of the groom and age of the bride has the largest effect on matching behavior in India. More importantly, it finds that marital transfers from brides and their families to grooms and their families increase the likelihood of women marrying men of similar type.
This paper analyzes how variables that shape intrahousehold bargaining relate to spouses’ labor supply. We estimate a collective model using data from the EU-SILC over 2004–2019 for 17 countries. Results provide evidence of the relevance of the following distribution factors: sex ratio, non-labor income, age difference, education difference, and fertility rates. The sex ratio seems to be a distribution factor in Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Switzerland. In addition, the wife’s share of non-labor income is a distribution factor in Belgium, Czech Republic, Estonia, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and the UK. In Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the UK the spouses’ age gap displays opposite signs on spouses’ labor supply, whereas in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, and the UK the spouses’ education level differences display intrahousehold bargaining signs. Finally, the fertility rate is a distribution factor in Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Ireland, Latvia, Portugal, Switzerland, and the UK. These results indicate that spousal- and country-specific characteristics are assessed differently across Europe and may help planners to implement household policies on cash transfers, schooling, and fertility.
In this piece, I use consumption as a lens to argue how urban, middle-class Indians in their middle and later ages are emerging as a distinctive consumer society while rewriting the scripts of growing old in India. This cultural shift is happening at a time when novel modes of ageing are imagined against the backdrop of transnational family arrangements, market-based care and a quest for vitality and autonomy among older Indians, altering the cultural continuities of intergenerational relationships. I show how consumption as a cultural force both expands the expressive capabilities of older persons but, at the same time, imposes disciplinary discourses around the family and social relationships. Overall, I critically reflect on what the ‘downward blurring’ of the ageing self does to the contemporary frameworks of intergenerational relationships in India. I conclude by discussing both the possibility and the (cultural) limit of theories developed in the industrialized West to capture the shifting realities of transitional societies.
Every four years since 2004, the Copenhagen Consensus Center has organized and hosted a high profile thought experiment about how a hypothetical extra $75 billion of development assistance money might best be spent to solve twelve of the major crises facing the world today. Collated in this specially commissioned book, a group of more than 50 experts make their cases for investment, discussing how to combat problems ranging from armed conflicts, corruption and trade barriers, to natural disasters, hunger, education and climate change. For each case, 'Alternative Perspectives' are also included to provide a critique and make other suggestions for investment. In addition, a panel of senior economists, including four Nobel Laureates, rank the attractiveness of each policy proposal in terms of its anticipated cost-benefit ratio. This thought-provoking book opens up debate, encouraging readers to come up with their own rankings and decide which solutions are smarter than others.
Every four years since 2004, the Copenhagen Consensus Center has organized and hosted a high profile thought experiment about how a hypothetical extra $75 billion of development assistance money might best be spent to solve twelve of the major crises facing the world today. Collated in this specially commissioned book, a group of more than 50 experts make their cases for investment, discussing how to combat problems ranging from armed conflicts, corruption and trade barriers, to natural disasters, hunger, education and climate change. For each case, 'Alternative Perspectives' are also included to provide a critique and make other suggestions for investment. In addition, a panel of senior economists, including four Nobel Laureates, rank the attractiveness of each policy proposal in terms of its anticipated cost-benefit ratio. This thought-provoking book opens up debate, encouraging readers to come up with their own rankings and decide which solutions are smarter than others.
Every four years since 2004, the Copenhagen Consensus Center has organized and hosted a high profile thought experiment about how a hypothetical extra $75 billion of development assistance money might best be spent to solve twelve of the major crises facing the world today. Collated in this specially commissioned book, a group of more than 50 experts make their cases for investment, discussing how to combat problems ranging from armed conflicts, corruption and trade barriers, to natural disasters, hunger, education and climate change. For each case, 'Alternative Perspectives' are also included to provide a critique and make other suggestions for investment. In addition, a panel of senior economists, including four Nobel Laureates, rank the attractiveness of each policy proposal in terms of its anticipated cost-benefit ratio. This thought-provoking book opens up debate, encouraging readers to come up with their own rankings and decide which solutions are smarter than others.
Every four years since 2004, the Copenhagen Consensus Center has organized and hosted a high profile thought experiment about how a hypothetical extra $75 billion of development assistance money might best be spent to solve twelve of the major crises facing the world today. Collated in this specially commissioned book, a group of more than 50 experts make their cases for investment, discussing how to combat problems ranging from armed conflicts, corruption and trade barriers, to natural disasters, hunger, education and climate change. For each case, 'Alternative Perspectives' are also included to provide a critique and make other suggestions for investment. In addition, a panel of senior economists, including four Nobel Laureates, rank the attractiveness of each policy proposal in terms of its anticipated cost-benefit ratio. This thought-provoking book opens up debate, encouraging readers to come up with their own rankings and decide which solutions are smarter than others.
Every four years since 2004, the Copenhagen Consensus Center has organized and hosted a high profile thought experiment about how a hypothetical extra $75 billion of development assistance money might best be spent to solve twelve of the major crises facing the world today. Collated in this specially commissioned book, a group of more than 50 experts make their cases for investment, discussing how to combat problems ranging from armed conflicts, corruption and trade barriers, to natural disasters, hunger, education and climate change. For each case, 'Alternative Perspectives' are also included to provide a critique and make other suggestions for investment. In addition, a panel of senior economists, including four Nobel Laureates, rank the attractiveness of each policy proposal in terms of its anticipated cost-benefit ratio. This thought-provoking book opens up debate, encouraging readers to come up with their own rankings and decide which solutions are smarter than others.
Purpose: To build an applied strategic model which is suitable for brick-and-mortar (B&M) retailing in India to achieve sustainable and organic profit.
Design/Methodology/Approach: Pragmatism research philosophical paradigm; Abductive research approach; Multi-method choice and longitudinal time horizon for data collection; qualitative and quantitative data analysis techniques. Findings/Result: The SOPR-b model has established a statistically significant positive relationship between the share of organic profit; organic growth in customers' repeat visit/purchase intention; organic customer orientation in the marketing mix and margin of safety; ownership and accountability held by the employees of sales & store operations; sales and stores operation orientation in the organizational structure; organic customer retention orientation in the performance measures and rewards. Originality/Value: The new strategic model developed draws on insights from over 9 empirical studies, 26 qualitative studies, 35 field experiments, evaluation of over 20 million customer-level transactions, and important existing theories, models, and frameworks from multiple disciplines that are pertinent to the Indian context in the accessible literature.
Sexual well-being plays an important role in the quality of life. Against this background, we provide an economics-based approach to the relationship between the Big Five personality traits and various dimensions of sexuality. From a theoretical viewpoint, personality influences sexual well-being not only by how a person feels about sex, but also by how the person behaves in a sexual relationship. Personality shapes information sharing about sexual preferences, the way dissonant sexual preferences of the partners are handled, and the extent to which a person is committed to promises made to a partner. Using a large representative dataset from Germany, we find that personality traits play a role in a person’s own sexual satisfaction, in (the self-assessment of) fulfilling their partner’s sexual needs and desires, in sexual communication, in actual and desired frequency of sex, and in extradyadic affairs. Conscientiousness contributes to a mutually beneficial sex life and increases a person’s commitment to their partner. The opposite holds true for neuroticism. While extraversion and openness to experience help realize a mutually beneficial sex life, we find no evidence that they have a commitment value. On the contrary, extraversion is associated with lower commitment to the partner. Agreeableness contributes to higher commitment. However, agreeableness appears to make people more reluctant to express their sexual needs and desires.
Ancré en sociologie, ce texte vise à clarifier l’emploi du concept d’arrangements de famille dans les sciences sociales de langue française et anglaise et précise son intérêt par rapport au terme concurrent de négociation pour décrire la prise collective de décisions par des personnes apparentées. Cette conceptualisation permet de penser la production plus ou moins formalisée d’un consensus entre des personnes apparentées qui ont éventuellement des intérêts contradictoires et sont prises localement dans des rapports de pouvoir, et plus généralement dans des rapports de domination qui les dépassent. L’article insiste sur la dimension temporelle de ces arrangements qui sont tout à la fois un processus et un résultat.
We provide a critique of the standard methodology for inequality measurement, which makes welfare comparisons between households by deflating household income and consumption with an equivalence scale. We argue that this leads to support for tax/transfer policies that significantly disadvantage low to middle income households and second earners—predominantly women. Its main limitations are that it takes an overly-simplistic approach to household production, bases its welfare measurements on joint household income, and has no theory of the family household. We point the way to an alternative procedure by presenting a theoretical model of the family household that derives duality-based welfare measures. In the light of current data limitations we propose, as a second best, primary earner income as a superior base to joint income for across-household welfare comparisons in policy formulation. We also emphasise the importance of taking the family life cycle into account when making such comparisons. We use the Australian income tax system and Australian income and tax data for a detailed comparison of the standard approach with our proposed alternative.
The extended family household, in which multiple generations or married siblings of a family live together, is common in developing countries. We conducted a series of public goods experiments in such households in five villages in rural North India to shed light on decision-making efficiency within this household structure. In this experiment, we offered household members the choice to receive either a lower amount over which they have private control or a higher payout that becomes a common resource. We measure efficiency as the degree to which individuals are willing to forego personal rewards for larger, collective rewards. We find that relationships within extended households are not equally efficient, with the relationship between the daughter-in-law and mother-in-law particularly problematic. Supplementary survey and qualitative evidence points to the role of decision-making power, with young, married women lacking the power to assert their preferences in extended households and resorting to actions that reduce the overall efficiency of the household.
While many theoretical works, particularly in family economics, rely on the transferable utility (TU) assumption, its exact implications in terms of individual preferences have never been fully worked out. In this paper, we provide a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a group to satisfy the TU property. We express these conditions in terms of both individual indirect utilities and individual demand functions. Last, we describe the link between this question and a standard problem in consumer theory (initially raised by Gorman 1953), and explain why a similar characterization in terms of direct utilities cannot obtain.
We have not clearly acknowledged the abstraction from unpriceable “social goods” (derived from communities) which, different from private and public goods, simply disappear if it is attempted to market them. Separability from markets and economics has not been argued, much less established. Acknowledging communities would reinforce rather than undermine them, and thus facilitate the production of social goods. But it would also help economics by facilitating our understanding of – and response to – financial crises as well as environmental destruction and many social problems, and by reducing the alienation from economics often felt by students and the public.
In this paper, we examine strategic settings in which players have interdependent preferences. Players' utility functions depend not only on the strategy profile being played, but also on the realized utilities of other players. Thus, players' realized utilities are interdependent, capturing the psychological phenomena of affective empathy and emotional contagion. We offer a solution concept for these empathetic games and show that the set of equilibria is non-empty and, generically, finite. Motivated by psychological evidence, we then analyze sympathetic and antipathetic games. In the former, players' utilities increase in others' realized utilities, capturing unconditional friendship; in the latter, the opposite holds, resembling hostility.
This study identifies the impact of access to and the speed of divorce on the welfare of children in a middle income largely Catholic country. Using difference-in-difference estimation techniques, I compare school enrollment for children of married and cohabiting parent households before and after the legalization of divorce. Implementing pro-homemaker divorce laws increased school enrollment anywhere from 3.4 to 5.5 percentage points, and the effect was particularly salient on secondary school students. I provide evidence that administrative processes influencing the speed of divorce affect household bargaining and investments in schooling. With every additional six months wait to the finalization of divorce, school enrollment decreased by approximately one percentage point. The impact almost doubles for secondary schooling. When contemplating development policies, advocates, policymakers, and leaders should not overlook the impact changes in family policies and administrative processes can have on advancements in child welfare and, ultimately, economic development. (JEL: D12, D13, J12, I21, I25).
This chapter is a first step toward a comparative history of child adoption law and practices in Western Europe since child adoption became legal in Germany (1900), Sweden (1917), France (1923), England and Wales (1927), and Italy (1942). Relying mainly on long-time series from these five countries, I analyze the incidence and the developments of domestic adoptions of both unrelated and related children and more recent developments in intercountry adoption. In most Western European countries, child adoption incidence increased from the early twentieth century to approximately the 1970s, likely because of rising demand for child adoption. Child adoption incidence has decreased since the 1970s because of a fall in adoptable children from both domestic and foreign backgrounds. In addition, the people of Sweden and England and Wales have long adopted children much more frequently than those of Germany, let alone France and Italy. The history of child adoption in Western Europe thus reflects major demographic trends since 1900 as well as a North-South gradient in child adoption incidence.
This paper examines the role of parental transfers on family size. We introduce a simple theoretical model of fertility decision where preferences towards children may differ between female and male spouses. Parental transfers increase both the household income and the bargaining power of the recipient spouse. Therefore, transfers from wife’s and husband’s parents may have dissimilar effects on the number of children. Our empirical result, based on a unique household-level data for Japan, supports this hypothesis. In particular, received transfers from the wife’s parents are negatively associated with the demand for children. In contrast, both received and expected transfers from the husband’s parents are positively associated with the demand for children. These results hold important policy implications.
Every four years since 2004, the Copenhagen Consensus Center has organized and hosted a high profile thought experiment about how a hypothetical extra $75 billion of development assistance money might best be spent to solve twelve of the major crises facing the world today. Collated in this specially commissioned book, a group of more than 50 experts make their cases for investment, discussing how to combat problems ranging from armed conflicts, corruption and trade barriers, to natural disasters, hunger, education and climate change. For each case, 'Alternative Perspectives' are also included to provide a critique and make other suggestions for investment. In addition, a panel of senior economists, including four Nobel Laureates, rank the attractiveness of each policy proposal in terms of its anticipated cost-benefit ratio. This thought-provoking book opens up debate, encouraging readers to come up with their own rankings and decide which solutions are smarter than others.
We consider issues of family formations. From a biological viewpoint, the ultimate goal of human beings can be viewed as raising children who possess the same gene. Only the genes that successfully achieved this goal survived. Although we may not view it as the goal of our life, it is important to understand how such a biological goal has been pursued by human beings.
This chapter focuses on human capital, as the analytical foundation for studying differences among individuals and the effects of those differences on their behavior. It presents the theory of labor supply based on the utility-maximization model, and presents the theory of labor demand as the demand for a factor of production, derived from the demands for the products made with labor and other inputs. It discusses issues in the contractual agreements that accommodate the diversity of people, technologies, and circumstances. The chapter addresses economic motivations for migration and economic consequences of migrations in which free choice can play the principal role or a relatively minor one. Refugee relocations and invasions have been prominent in either the evidence or suspicions in the ancient Mediterranean Basin. The chapter treats labor use in the family enterprise, focusing on the influence on labor of imperfections in, or even the absence, of other markets.
The chapter addresses the dynamics of marriage and divorce rates and the determinants of getting married and divorced in the period 1994–2014 in Russia. The chapter provides an overview of current statistical trends, theoretical considerations, and a review of existing empirical studies of contemporary marriage and divorce in Russia. Finally, it describes tested empirical models and results from a regression analysis of marriage and divorce determinants. Russian demographic changes are discussed in relation to global shifts in married life, which is becoming more flexible and diverse. In many European countries, as females become more career oriented and more independent they become less tolerant of unsuccessful marriages. Is this global trend relevant to Russian society? Do children still prevent divorce among Russian couples? How much do alcohol and smoking affect marriage prospects in Russia? These are the questions answered in this chapter.
Legal structures of divorce settlements are important in how marital division of labour impacts on divorce. They affect not only divorce welfare but also within-marriage allocations. A central question in this context is whether or not intra-marital bargaining is Coasean, where Coasean bargains are characterised by the costless transfer of utility between spouses when property rights are well defined. In Coasean bargains divorces are efficient in the sense that they cannot occur when the joint surplus within marriage is larger than the sum of individual divorcees’ values outside marriage. This is because the spouse with the highest value can always compensate the spouse who wants to leave, and thus persuade her/him to stay. Under non-Coasean bargaining inefficient divorces can occur, due to the absence of costless side-payments. This paper offers a theoretical framework to identify Coasean and non-Coasean behaviour. Whilst an increase in the spouse’s wage always reduces (increases) non-Coasean labour supply (home production), it increases both labour supply and home production under Coasean bargains. Observing labour supply falls after a divorce will again indicate Coasean bargaining. The paper provides a possible explanation for why both males’ preferences for stereotypical work division and females’ preference for non-monetary work aspects persist.
The children of different-sex married couples appear to be advantaged on a range of outcomes relative to the children of different-sex cohabiting couples. Despite the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States, whether and how this general pattern extends to the children of same-sex married and cohabiting couples is unknown. This study examines this question with nationally representative data from the 2004-2013 pooled National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). Results reveal that children in cohabiting households have poorer health outcomes than children in married households regardless of the sex composition of their parents. Children in same-sex and different-sex married households are relatively similar to each other on health outcomes, as are children in same-sex and different-sex cohabiting households. These patterns are not fully explained by socioeconomic differences among the four different types of families. This evidence can inform general debates about family structure and child health as well as policy interventions aiming to reduce child health disparities.
We propose a dynamic equilibrium model of human capital development of a child that can explain why a parent-child relationship might lead to child maltreatment. Assuming that a parent cannot observe a child’s human capital accumulation or effort, and that the child’s time preference develops endogenously, an unstable path of the parent’s beliefs regarding the child can persist in equilibrium when the parent faces a high degree of uncertainty in inferring the child’s human capital. The parent with an initial high estimate of the human capital then tends to underestimate the child’s effort, which results in persistently punitive—abusive—nteractions.
This paper explores the impact of inter-generational transfers on the marital surplus, measured as the difference between the utility level in marriage and in divorce. To that end, we consider a three-generation family playing a two-stage sequential game. In this framework, we find conditions under which an increase in inter-generational transfers leads to a decrease in the marital surplus, which may reduce the incentives of parents to donate income to their married children. Supplemental analysis, developed to study whether inter-generational transfers are crowded out by public transfers, suggests that altruistically-motivated inter-generational transfers are not always displaced by public transfers, especially when parents are highly altruistic.
PurposeUnder the impetus of federal law, each state is required to develop Guidelines by which to determine presumptive child support awards following divorce. The key federal requirement is that during the specified quadrennial reviews of each state’s Guidelines, “a state must consider economic data on the cost of raising children.” Our purpose here is to compare presumptive child support awards provided in typical state Guidelines with the actual monetary costs of raising children.
Methodology/approachTo this end, we estimate these monetary costs from government data on consumer outlays in households with children as compared with substantially similar childless households. We review and reject current methods for determining child costs: both from income equivalence methods and those offered in annual government surveys; and provide quite different results despite using the same data employed by others.
FindingsOur econometric results indicate much lower monetary costs than reported for either of the two alternatives. Since presumptive child support awards in most states rely on current methods, these findings suggest that existing award structures should be re-evaluated.
Practical implicationsCurrent award structures create a financial asset resulting from the gap between presumptive awards and monetary costs for custodial parents. This factor engenders resentment by support payers since it is his or her payments that fund this asset. And this resentment harms relationships between the parents. Increased willingness of non-custodial parents to make their assessed payments is an outcome promoted when payment amounts reflect the actual monetary costs of raising children.
Die Zunahme nicht- oder vorehelicher Lebensgemeinschaften und der zumindest vorläufige Verzicht auf die Eheschließung stellt, zusammen mit dem Wandel des Fertilitätsverhaltens, sicher eine der wichtigsten Veränderungen der privaten Lebensführung der letzten 25 Jahre dar.1 Dies zeigt sich nicht nur bei Querschnittbetrachtungen (vgl. Niemeyer 1994), sondern vor allem auch bei einer Längsschnittanalyse verschiedener Geburtsjahrgänge. Der Anteil der Personen, die bis etwa zu ihrem 30. Lebensjahr mindestens einmal in einer längeren Nichtehelichen Lebensgemeinschaft gelebt haben, hat sich, wenn man etwa die Familiensurveys 1988 und 1994 als Datengrundlage heranzieht (vgl. Bertram 1991; Bien 1996), von weniger als 3 Prozent für den Geburtsjahrgang 1940 auf circa ein Drittel für die um 1960 herum Geborenen vervielfacht (vgl. für eine genauere Analyse den Beitrag von Gruber sowie die betreffende Arbeit von Klein in diesem Band).
In this paper, after the investigation of 410 farmers' investment in Shandong province, using the method of Paneldata Model test regional marketization differences affecting the structure of farmers' investment. The results show that agricultural machinery, TV number and proportion of non-agricultural labor has a positive effect on the farmers' primary industry investment. Agricultural mechanical force is higher, farmers are more willing to engage in primary industry investment. This affectes its secondary industry investment. The proportion of wage in total income and cash income in net income increased don't promote farmers to invest more on the secondary industry, and farmers are willing to invest part of cash income into the tertiary industry; TV and telephone numbers are higher, farmers getting outside information faster and more comprehensive, farmers are willing to increase their investment. In the process of industrial structure adjustment, the tertiary industry is the most favours investment for farmers. In addition to agricultural machinery, other regional market factors have contributed to increase the farmers' investment in the tertiary industry. Barries to entry tertiary industry are low (including low capital requirements, technical requirements) and investment rate of return in the tertiary industry is higher than in primary industry, so when the farmers' funds are sufficient, they are more willing to invest in the tertiary industry.
It is possible to have income effects on more than one good in utility profiles that lead to Transferable Utility (TU) and in the presence of many private and many public goods. Assuming that the utility functions are of the Generalized Quasi-linear (GQL) form is not necessary for TU to hold. I present a much broader class of utility profiles generating TU in which GQL emerges as a special case.
The paper proposed a novel approach to identifying intra-household allocations in households with two decision-makers. We addressed the issue by using the collective model of labor supply. Most empirical studies based on the collective approach were restricted to the identification of the sharing rule guiding individual allocations up to a constant. We suggested using individual welfare satisfaction data as an additional source of identification. An empirical example was given using the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. The sharing rule was found to be related to the spouses’ wage and age differences and number of children. Sharing varied with the level of household income: In low-income households, sharing was equal; in middle (high) income households men held a slight (strong) advantage.
To identify which spouses respond to asymmetric information, I play two dictator games with each member of the couple. One decision is kept secret from the respondent's spouse, while another choice is public. Most people give the same amount in public and secret, while a minority behave opportunistically and give more to their spouse in public and less in secret. The types identified in the lab also behave differently at home. For those who behave opportunistically in the lab, greater knowledge about finances at home is associated with worse opportunism in the lab, suggesting that for these couples complete information at home is not due to trust but rather is an endogenous response to non-cooperative behavior. The paper highlights that allowing for heterogeneous types changes the conclusions we draw about appropriate models of the household and suggests that laboratory games can be used to identify household types useful in the interpretation of field data.
This paper focuses on strategic interaction within a family and examines individual decision making. We set up a two-stage game model. In the first stage of the game, a man and a woman who have not yet met simultaneously determine their education levels non-cooperatively. In the second stage, they marry and determine their leisure time. In the second stage, we compare two decision modes, non-cooperative and cooperative, in order to characterize the nature of cooperation within the families. In addition, we extend the basic model on the basis of a Stackelberg game. In this setting, we consider the case in which a man acts as a leader and a woman acts as a follower. We show that the leader invests in higher education and chooses more leisure time than the follower. This coincides with the empirical findings.
We explore whether stable matchings and trade in commodities can coexist. For this purpose, we consider competitive markets for multiple commodities with endogenous formation of one- or two-person households. Within each two-person household, individuals obtain utility from his/her own private consumption, from discrete actions such as job choice, from the partner’s observable characteristics such as appearance and hobbies, from some of the partner’s consumption vectors, and from the partner’s action choices. We investigate competitive market outcomes with an endogenous household structure in which no individual and no man/woman pair can deviate profitably. We find a set of sufficient conditions under which a stable matching equilibrium exists. We further establish the first welfare theorem for this economy.
This contribution investigates whether the introduction of Khul, Islamic unilateral divorce rights for women, helps to explain recent dramatic increases in women's labor supply in Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries over the 1980–2008 period. It shows, using data for eighteen countries, that Khul reform increased the labor force participation of women relative to men. Furthermore, we find evidence that the effect of Khul is larger for younger women (ages 24–34) compared to older women (ages 35–55). Younger women increased their labor force participation by 6 percent, which accounts for about 10 percent of the increase in their labor force participation from 1980 to 2008.
This paper measures how the costs of children are shared between the father and the mother by estimating a gender-specific demand system related to the demand for market goods, household products and leisure within a collective approach. The estimates illustrate how the intra-household distribution of resources varies across households with and without children and how wages and non-labor income affect the allocation rule in both single-earner and double-earner households. In the presence of a child, both parents, but mothers especially, increase their involvement in home production at the expense of the enjoyment of leisure. This commitment decreases as the child gets older. In general, mothers control less than half of the household resources, while they bear more than half of the cost of maintaining a child.
Evolutionary theory predicts humans to be more altruistic towards genetically more closely related kin. Because fathers face uncertainty about the relation to their children, the asymmetric parental altruism hypothesis predicts mothers to provide a higher share of parental care than fathers. We tested this hypothesis using parental choice experiments in rural Tanzania, in which fathers and mothers could choose between an outcome that benefited themselves and an outcome that benefited their children. When a parent was solely responsible for the outcome, mothers chose more altruistic than fathers. However when the choice situation was changed into a coordination game in which responsibility was shared with the partner, the sex difference disappeared. Fathers then chose somewhat more altruistic, but mothers substantially less. Our findings thus partly support the asymmetric parental altruism hypothesis, but they also show that parental altruism is influenced by the context in which choices are taken.
Under irrigated agriculture one of the main causes of yield variability, which is the plant- available water, is controlled. In this case, other yield limitations caused by soil attributes become more relevant. To investigate the spatial variability of soil attributes and crop yields, besides the relation between chemical and physical-hydric soil attributes and crop yields of two irrigated commercial plantations (51.8 and 58.2 ha) were studied in Trindade do Sul (TS) and Palmeira das Missões (PM) respectively, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The soil was sampled from a regular grid of 100 x 100 m in the 0-0.10 m layer for chemical analysis. To investigate the relation between chemical and physical-hydric soil attributes and yields, due to the large area of the plantations, three soil management zones were established based on yield maps available (common bean in 2005/06 and 2006, in TS, and corn in 2002/03 and 2003/04, in PM) recorded by harvesters equipped with yield sensors. In these zones, 15 grid points were sampled in the layers 0-0.05, 0.05-0.10 and 0.10-0.20 m to analyze soil attributes. These underlying soil data, analyzed by descriptive statistics and geostatistics, classified the spatial dependence as strong and moderate, with predominance of the spherical model. Spatial variability was highest for P and lowest for pH. Although both plantations were irrigated there was spatial variability in the yields. In the low-yield zone in TS soil acidity, low base saturation and lower available soil water capacity was diagnosed, while in PM the yield constraints were associated to soil compaction, expressed in the bulk density, soil resistance and macroporosity. The low yield zones of irrigated crops, in both croplands, were linked mainly to chemical and physical limitations in the subsurface.
Since 2003, about 14 % of U.S. Army soldiers have reported symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following deployments. In this article, we examine how post-deployment symptoms of PTSD and of other mental health conditions are related to the probability of divorce among married active-duty U.S. Army soldiers. For this purpose, we combine Army administrative individual-level longitudinal data on soldiers' deployments, marital history, and sociodemographic characteristics with their self-reported post-deployment health information. Our estimates indicate that time spent in deployment increases the divorce risk among Army enlisted personnel and that PTSD symptoms are associated with further increases in the odds of divorce. Although officers are generally less likely to screen positive for PTSD than enlisted personnel, we find a stronger relationship between PTSD symptoms and divorces among Army officers who are PTSD-symptomatic than among enlisted personnel. We estimate a larger impact of deployments on the divorce risk among female soldiers, but we do not find a differential impact of PTSD symptoms by gender. Also, we find that most of the effect of PTSD symptoms occurs early in the career of soldiers who deploy multiple times.
Owing to the armed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, members of the US
military have experienced very high rates of deployment overseas. Because military
personnel have little to no control over their deployments, the military setting offers
a unique opportunity to study the causal effect of major disruptions on marital dissolution.
In this paper, we use longitudinal individual-level administrative data from
1999 to 2008 and find that an additional month in deployment increases the divorce
hazard of military families, with females being more affected. A standard conceptual
framework of marital formation and dissolution predicts a differential effect of these
types of shocks depending on the degree to which they are anticipated when a couple
gets married. Consistent with this prediction, we find a larger effect for couples
married before 9/11, who clearly expected a lower risk of deployment than what they
faced post 9/11.
In early modern Europe, as in developing countries today, much of the population had to struggle to survive. Estimates for many parts of pre-industrial Europe, as for several countries in the so-called Third World, suggest that the majority of the inhabitants owned so little property that their livelihood was highly insecure. Basically, all those who lived by the work of their hands were at risk, and the reasons for their vulnerability were manifold. Economic cycles and seasonal fluctuations jeopardized the livelihood of the rural and urban masses. Warfare, taxation, and other decisions by the ruling elites sometimes had far-reaching direct and indirect repercussions on the lives of the poor. This is also true of natural factors, both catastrophes and the usual weather fluctuations, which were a major factor affecting harvest yields. Equal in importance were the risks and uncertainties inherent in life and family cycles: disease, old age, widowhood, or having many young children.
Boserup (1970) views dowry as a payment made by women to guarantee future support for them and their children under circumstances where their own contributions to subsistence are relatively small. We call this the labor-value model. Here, building on the polygyny threshold theory from behavioral ecology (Orians 1969), we view dowry as a reproductive tactic used by prospective brides and their kin to attract the wealthiest bridegrooms. Our model predicts dowry in stratified, nonpolygynous societies where the desirability of wealthy males is not reduced by diversion of resources to additional wives and their children. We call this the female-competition model. We use discriminant analysis to test both these models on the 1,267 societies of the Ethnographic Atlas. While both models perform better than chance, the female-competition model is clearly superior. It accurately predicts the occurrence of dowry in nearly 95% of societies and identifies coding errors in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample with extreme efficiency.
We consider a general model of the non-cooperative provision of a public good. Under very weak assumptions there will always exist a unique Nash equilibrium in our model. A small redistribution of wealth among the contributing consumers will not change the equilibrium amount of the public good. However, larger redistributions of wealth will change the set of contributors and thereby change the equilibrium provision of the public good. We are able to characterize the properties and the comparative statics of the equilibrium in a quite complete way and to analyze the extent to which government provision of a public good ‘crowds out’ private contributions.
Most development objectives focus on the well-being of individuals. Policies are targeted to increase the percentage of individuals who avoid poverty, who can read, who are free from hunger and illness, or who can find gainful employment. Individual welfare, however, is based in large part on a complex set of interactions among family members.
Until recently most policy analyses implicitly viewed the household as having only one set of preferences. This assumption has been a powerful tool for understanding household behaviour, such as the distribution of tasks and goods. But a growing body of evidence suggests that this view is an expedience that comes at considerable, and possibly avoidable, cost. The article argues that more effective policy instruments will emerge from analyzing the processes by which households balance the diverse interests of their members.
I. Introduction: widespread use of community indifference curves, 1. — II. Attempts to justify the use of community indifference
curves, 3. — III. Proof of the nonexistence of community indifference contours, 4. — IV. Nature of Scitovsky's community indifference
contours, 6. — V. Problem of family preference: a parable, 8. — VI. Optimal ways of achieving income redistribution, 12. —
VII. Regular properties of social indifference contours, 14. — VIII. Perfect competition and bliss, 19. — IX. Final summary,
21.
This chapter highlights the question whether second-best saving is greater or smaller than first-best saving when given future saving is non-optimal from the standpoint of the present generation. The chapter presents the postulation that all generations expect each succeeding generation to choose the saving ratio that is second-best in its eyes. This somewhat game-theoretic model leads to the concept of an equilibrium sequence of saving-income ratios having the property that no generation acting alone can do better and all generations act so as to warrant the expectations of the future saving ratios. The chapter presents a comparison of this equilibrium and the first-best optimum. The concept and calculation of the second-best optimum is of interest even if that analysis does not explain actual national saving because society as a whole has no notion of such an optimum.
This paper considers the hypothesis that commodities purchased on the market by consumers are inputs into the production of goods within the household. Its implications for the family of consumer demand functions whose arguments are real income and relative prices are drawn and compared with those of the hypothesis of additive separability. The paper closes with some examples of differences in commodity demand elasticities which are qualitatively consistent with the household production hypothesis and some comments upon how the latter might be utilized in empirical work.
This chapter presents a comparison of alternative marriage models. The vital events, other than marriage, can be included in a linear model, whose application can be straightforward although tedious. A marriage function is a function for predicting the numbers of marriages, which can occur during a unit of time, between males in particular categories and females in particular categories, from knowledge of the numbers available in the various categories. An increase in availability can never decrease the number of marriages. The term intermediate dominance applies generically to functions, which are compromises between those of female and male dominance, including the several types of averages. The mutual agreement model, the iterative adjustment model, and the panmictic circles model, specifies the marriage function in terms of a numerical procedure to be applied to matrices of marriage data.
Cross-cultural data are used to test the hypotheses that (1) polygyny in humans is resource polygyny and (2) parents transfer wealth to male heirs when wealth increases the heirs' chance of obtaining multiple mates. A reinterpretation of Freud's Oedipus complex follows as an adjunct.
This paper presents a problem which I believe has not heretofore been analysed2 and provides a theory to explain, under different circumstances, three related phenomena: (1) spendthriftiness; (2) the deliberate regimenting of one’s future economic behaviour— even at a cost; and (3) thrift. The senses in which we deal with these topics can probably not be very well understood, however, until after the paper has been read; but a few sentences at this point may shed some light on what we are up to.
The impatience implications of several axiom sets assumed for preferences over an infinite future are explored. Sufficient conditions for the existence of a continuous utility function are presented. This analysis is done both for the product topology and the metric function equating the distance between two infinite streams to the maximal one-period difference between them.
We are primarily concerned here with the question of integrability of the total demand in a model in which each consumer acts according to a cardinal utility function and has a fixed monetary income. It is well known that concavity of the various utilities is not sufficient to guarantee integrability, nor even to ensure rationality of the revealed preference. We show that if each personal utility function is homogeneous, in addition to satisfying the usual regularity conditions, then an aggregate utility function can be defined explicitly in terms of the given utilities. Furthermore, under the same assumptions we give a new characterization of equilibrium and show that equilibrium satisfactions are unique.
To remedy the neglect of altruism in benefit assessments for risk regulation programs, this article reports the findings of a new survey of 785 consumers regarding their valuation of two pairs of risks from insecticide. The risk-dollar tradeoffs revealed by consumers averaged 3,680 per injury pair prevented within the household; they were willing to pay 9.06 per 1000 injury pairs prevented in the rest of the state and 2.39 for each 1000 injury pairs avoided elsewhere in the United States. The summed altruistic values for other individuals exceeded the private valuations, which suggests that altruism may be an important benefit component.
The assignment game is a model for a two-sided market in which a product that comes in large, indivisible units (e.g., houses, cars, etc.) is exchanged for money, and in which each participant either supplies or demands exactly one unit. The units need not be alike, and the same unit may have different values to different participants. It is shown here that the outcomes in thecore of such a game — i.e., those that cannot be improved upon by any subset of players — are the solutions of a certain linear programming problem dual to the optimal assignment problem, and that these outcomes correspond exactly to the price-lists that competitively balance supply and demand. The geometric structure of the core is then described and interpreted in economic terms, with explicit attention given to the special case (familiar in the classic literature) in which there is no product differentiation — i.e., in which the units are interchangeable. Finally, a critique of the core solution reveals an insensitivity to some of the bargaining possibilities inherent in the situation, and indicates that further analysis would be desirable using other game-theoretic solution concepts.
Since it is logically impossible to hold constant both male and female age-specific fertility rates, the intrinsic growth
rates or the net reproduction rates for males and females, based on that assumption, are internally inconsistent. The interactive
two-sex model presented in this paper holds constant a set of bivariate age-specific fertility rates by age of men and women
and allows the male and female age-specific fertility rates to adjust themselves to achieve stability. The model gives the
same intrinsic growth rate for both sexes and generates intrinsic age-specific fertility rates and intrinsic net reproduction rates for males and females which are consistent and can operate simultaneously on a population. The model
is applied to the U.S. data for 1940–1971, and the results are compared with those obtained from the one-sex models.
The paper considers utility functinals which embody nonpaternalistic intergenerational altruism so that each generation's utility level depends not only on its own consumption but also on other (possibly infinitely many) generations' utility levels. Two concepts of utility functionals are proposed; they are based on the supposition either that people regard dead ancestors' utility levels as givens or that, in evaluating present and future consumptions, people consider how the ancestors would respond if they were alive. Unique existence of such functionals is proved and some properties analyzed under a condition which basically says that the degrees of altruism are not excessive.
In a well-known paper Gorman (Econometrica21 (1953)) established that the necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of an aggregate, or social, utility function, independent of the distribution of income, is that all individuals' income consumption paths be parallel straight lines. Recently Chipman (J. Econ. Theory8 (1974)), building on the paper of Hurwicz and Uzawa (in “Preference Utility and Demand”) has shown that if the distribution of income is proportional and individual preferences are homothetic, aggregate consumption behavior obeys the necessary integrability conditions. It is shown here that the consistency of aggregate behavior can be derived from more general conditions than the ones used by Chipman and Gorman. Examples of demand systems from which aggregate behavior implies a social utility function are provided. It is then shown that if individual demand functions are linear in income—a form employed by both Gorman and Chipman—it is not necessary that the distribution of income be fixed.
Consider an assignment game with transferable utility where the optimally assigned partners engage in bargaining of the sort modelled by Nash, using as their threats the maximum they could receive in an alternative match. A symmetrically pairwise-bargained (SPB) allocation is a core allocation such that all partners are in bargained equilibrium. It is shown that an SPB allocation always exists, that the set of SPB allocations coincides with the intersection of the kernel and the core, and that there is a rebargaining process which converges to an SPB allocation if it begins at a “distinguished point” in the core.
Recursive dependence of altruistic utility on the utility of both children and parents is analyzed. Given reasonable restrictions on the extent of altruism, it is shown that in the static steady state of a simple overlapping generations model there will be some interval around the Golden Rule in which the economy responds to marginal changes just as would a Diamond economy. Dynamic inefficiency cannot be ruled out even in the presence of two-sided altruism. When per-capita income and consumption are growing at a constant rate, the gift motive can insure dynamic efficiency for some parameter values.
This paper investigates the problem facing national planners who realize that their successors may employ different social welfare criteria for determining economic policies than they do. In such a situation, we show that the present planners may want to leave future generations a smaller capital stock than they would if they thought the stock would be managed in a way consistent with their own preferences. On the other hand, we also identify cases in which the opposite is true. We obtain the results by studying an optimal aggregate growth model the utility function of which changes randomly from one generation to the next. We analyze the model using a system of functional equations in place of the conventional Bellman equation from dynamic programming theory.
A pure exchange economy generates a “market game” in which the allocations achievable by any coalition are determined by the initial endowments of its members. Subject to certain regularity conditions, it is shown that for a market game it is possible to find utility representations for each consumer so that the game can be treated as a game with transferable utility if and only if indirect utility of all consumers can be represented in the Gorman polar form. This is the class for which aggregate demand behaves as if it were the demand of a single consumer.
The article attempts to develop a general theory of the allocation of time in non-work activities. It sets out a basic theoretical analysis of choice that includes the cost of time on the same footing as the cost of market goods and treats various empirical implications of the theory. These include a new approach to changes in hours of work and leisure, the full integration of so-called productive consumption into economic analysis, a new analysis of the effect of income on the quantity and quality of commodities consumed, some suggestions on the measurement of productivity, an economic analysis of queues and a few others as well. The integration of production and consumption is at odds with the tendency for economists to separate them sharply, production occurring in firms and consumption in households. It should be pointed out, however, that in recent years economists increasingly recognize that a household is truly a small factory. It combines capital goods, raw materials and labor to clean, feed, procreate and otherwise produce useful commodities.
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If household income is pooled and then allocated to maximize welfare then income under the control of mothers and fathers should have the same impact on demand. With survey data on family health and nutrition in Brazil, the equality of parental income effects is rejected. Unearned income in the hands of a mother has a bigger effect on her family's health than income under the control of a father; for child survival probabilities the effect is almost twenty times bigger. The common preference (or neoclassical) model of the household is rejected. If unearned income is measured with error and income is pooled then the ratio of maternal to paternal income effects should be the same; equality of the ratios cannot be rejected. There is also evidence for gender preference: mothers prefer to devote resources to improving the nutritional status of their daughters, fathers to sons.
The McElroy-Horney Nash-bargaining model of family demand behavior relaxes the restriction that nonearned income of husband and wife had the identical effect on family labor supply and commodity demands. This restriction of the neoclassical model of family behavior is tested for the determination of husband and wife labor supply and fertility based on the 1981 Socioeconomic Survey of Thailand. The neoclassical restriction is rejected for female labor supply and fertility. Another unexplored limitation of family demand studies, due to the sample self selection of intact marriages, is empirically treated through alternative estimation strategies. In this case, a more sharply focused theory of marital behavior is needed to identify family demand models.
In households whose allocation decisions can be represented as Nash-bargained household decisions, extrahousehold environmental parameters (EEPs) serve as pure shifters of the threat points. The comparative statics of changes in demands due to changes in these EEPs are given. These are incorporated into a comprehensive statement of the empirical content of Nash-bargained household behavior, including a Nash generalization of Barten's (1966) fundamental matrix equation of the theory of consumer demand. Estimation and data requirements are discussed along with nested testing of the following structure: the neoclassical model is nested in the Nash-bargained model which, in turn, is nested in an unrestricted model of household demands. Emphasized throughout is the enriched menu of explanatory variables for demand analysis provided by the Nash model, as well as the model's ability to jointly analyze (i) household formation and (ii) intrahousehold allocation decisions.
This paper analyzes marriage market equilibria when the gains from marriage result from joint consumption of household public goods. Assuming transferable utility within marriage, the paper proves that marriage markets will be characterized by positive assortative mating on wealth when spouses differ only in endowments and the gains to marriage result only from public goods. When spouses differ in wages and household public goods are produced at home, the results imply offsetting effects, with public good economies creating an incentive for positive assortative mating on wages and gains from specialization creating an incentive for negative assortative mating on wages. The results help explain the persistent lack of empirical support for Becker's prediction of negative assortative mating on wages, and have implications for empirical analysis of all joint living arrangement decisions.