A NOTE ON INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY AND INTRAHOUSEHOLD BALANCE OF POWER

This paper studies how family's decisions about investments in children are an important determinant of adults' earnings, and thus of persistence in income differentials. We propose a model of investment in children that allows parents to have different preferences using a collective household framework, and investigate how the intrahousehold distribution of power affects children outcomes and the transmission of economic status across generations. The results suggest that failure to account for intrahousehold balance of power as source of household heterogeneity might affect the interpretation of the structural parameters of interest and the evaluation of earnings persistence.     

Tests of Income Pooling in Household Decisions

Using the Progresa data from Mexico, we investigate intrahousehold decision making using a variety of outcomes. We exploit both the experimental nature and the (short) panel dimension of the data to measure the impact of exogenous changes in the intrahousehold distribution of resources on household decisions. We test for global pooling of resources within households, which would correspond to the unitary model of household decision making. We also exploit a set of questions about power and the decision making process in the household to investigate aspects of strategic interactions between household members. Our findings confirm previous rejections of income pooling. We also cannot reject that the wife's relative income share is a significant determinant of the wife's decision making power in the household, with a higher share of income associated with more decision making power. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: J12, D13, H31.     

Household Decisions and Equilibrium Efficiency

A general equilibrium model is introduced where a household may consist of several members, each with individual preferences and/or resources. When households obey collective rationality, certain intrahousehold externalities can be fully internalized by the respective households so that competitive exchange among households is efficient. As a rule, however, such intrahousehold externalities are not fully internalized by individual household members acting in their personal interest so that competitive exchange among such individuals is only efficient in exceptional cases.     

Remittances and Household Expenditures on Education in Ghana's Northern Region: Why Gender Matters

Studies of the impact of migrant remittances on receiving households assume that these households act as a unit in receiving remittances and making decisions about their use. Thus, many of these studies use the gender of the household head as a key control variable. This study questions this assumption, using original qualitative and quantitative data on rural–urban migration of women in Ghana to show that gendered social norms of household provisioning influence the intrahousehold flow of remittances. Regression results indicate that migrant women are more likely to send remittances to other women, creating female-centered networks of remittance flows even within male-headed households. The implications of this for intrahousehold resource allocation are explored through an analysis of the impact of the gender of the remitter and recipient on education expenditure. The results show that regardless of the gender of the household head, households in which women are the primary recipient of remittances spend more than twice as much on education as households in which men are the primary recipient.     

The impact of targeting policy on spouses’ demand for public goods,labor supplies and sharing rule

This paper studies the impact of targeted unconditional cash transfers on the spouses’ demand for public goods, labor supplies and sharing of resources. We estimate a collective labor supply model with distributional factors which is extended to include preferences over marketable public goods (including child goods). In this way, unlike previous research, we consider the impact of such transfers on the intrahousehold allocation of resources and distinguish between the labeling and recipient effects. We exploit the UK experience and find evidence in favor of the collective model with separable preferences over labor supplies and public goods. This finding implies a recipient effect and not a labeling effect of child benefits. Given the household’s unearned income, the bigger the wife’s bargaining power, the more the resources allocated to public goods (including child goods) and the wife’s private consumption. The results can be useful in the design of family policy which aims to improve the relative welfare of children within the family and alleviate any intrahousehold consumption inequalities.     

And the winner is... An empirical evaluation of unitary and collective labour supply models

An empirical evaluation is presented of two competing flexible labour supply models. The first is a standard unitary model, while the second is based on the collective approach to household behaviour. The evaluation focuses on the testing of the model’s? theoretical implications and on their ability to identify structural information, like preferences and the intrahousehold allocation process. Models are applied to Dutch microdata from the DNB Household Survey. The unitary model cannot be rejected for male and female singles, while it is rejected for a sample of couples. The alternative collective model cannot be rejected for the same sample, allowing identification of individual preferences and an intrahousehold sharing rule that can be used as a basis for welfare economic policy evaluations.     

Household Management Systems and Women’s Decision Making Within the Family in Europe

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes household management systems and their effect on intrahousehold gender differences in decision making in thirty European countries. The study considers five domains that reflect two types of decisions – time-consuming and frequent decisions like everyday shopping versus infrequent but important decisions like borrowing money or purchasing consumer durables. In time-consuming activities, the gender gap favors women in each system; for infrequent decisions, the gender gap is dependent on the way money is managed and the biggest gap is found in systems where resources are not pooled. This paper also investigates the role of distribution factors in shaping decision-making behavior. For time-consuming decisions, the higher the income (and education) of the woman compared to the man, the less likely she is to make the decisions. For infrequent activities, the higher the income of the woman compared to the man, the more likely she is to make the decisions.     

Spending Time and Money within the Household*

We consider, both theoretically and empirically, the allocation of time and money within the household. The research question is whether a married person who enjoys more leisure than their partner also receives more consumption (which seems to indicate the outcome of power within the household) or receives less consumption (which seems to indicate differing intrahousehold preferences). We develop a simple parametric structural model with household production that is tested on survey data. We find that relative wages have an impact on power. For leisure, this effect is dominated by a conventional wage effect, in which the partner who has the higher wage takes less leisure.     

Patrilocality and human capital accumulationEvidence from Central Asia1

Anthropologists estimate that 70 percent of human societies are patrilocal, meaning that adult sons reside with their parents, and that wives go to live with their husbands’ families upon marriage. Yet very little is known about how this widespread social norm influences intrahousehold resource allocation and, through this, economic development. This paper examines the effects of patrilocality on schooling and household educational expenditures in Tajikistan. To identify the causal effect of living in a three versus two generation household on these outcomes, exogenous variation in housing availability across communities is exploited. It is shown that the impacts of living in a three generation household are important for both school enrolment and for educational spending. The results suggest that one reason why patrilocal societies remain poorer than those with nuclear household norms is that three generation households make relatively few human capital investments in the youngest generation. Patrilocality, which probably evolved to solve coordination problems in agrarian societies, may thus be a cause rather than simply a correlate of low educational attainment in developing countries.     

The incentive problem and the demise of team farming in China

This paper begins with a discussion of what can be inferred about the efficiency of collective farming from the demise of team production in rural China. After reviewing the formal literature on incentives in collective farms, it examines two problems that may have plagued the Chinese teams: first, excessive egalitarianism, which can be analyzed by modifying existing models, and second, monitoring problems, which require a departure from the perfect information context of those models. By numerical example, it is shown that the superiority of household farming over forced collective farming does not preclude the possibility that some team production would have existed in a democratic equilibrium dominating both of them. Finally, the post-reform household contracting system is examined with special reference to distributive and allocative issues.     

市民化过程中土地退出 问题与制度改革的新思路

本文认为市民化过程是一个综合性的、全局性的系统工程,仅仅依靠户籍制度改革是不能解决问题的,还必须同步推进土地制度改革。本文从农村集体成员定义角度提出了解决土地制度改革和户籍制度改革的新思路。本文的观点是,把静态集体成员变为动态的集体成员,就能同时解决市民化过程中农村的衰落和农民工有偿退出承包地的双重困境。     

SELF‐REPORTED ECONOMIC CONDITION AND HOME PRODUCTION: INTRA‐HOUSEHOLD ALLOCATION IN ITALY

This paper applies a collective model of intra‐household welfare distribution using individual self‐reported data. The model accounts for household production, and self‐reported information on economic condition is used to identify the sharing rule governing the bargaining process in the family. The theoretical framework implies a broad concept of full income, which includes household production as time allocated to domestic activities. We find that self‐reported data on economic status are useful in recovering individual shares of household income and that both wages and non‐strictly‐economic individual variables play an important role in the bargaining process determining the sharing rule in Italy.     

Recovering Hicksian Consumer Surplus within a Collective Model: Hausman's Method for the Household

The purpose of this paper is to describe the implications of the collective model of household behavior for the methods used to estimate the economic value of non-marketed environmental resources. After demonstrating how the separability restrictions inherent in the collective model allow individual preference and household income allocation choices to be distinguished, the paper demonstrates how the framework can be used to recover Hicksian consumer surplus. An algebraic example is used to illustrate how the framework can be used in valuing environmental resources.     

Publicly Provided Goods and Intrafamily Resource Allocation: Female Child Survival in India

The paper examines the problem of excess mortality of females in India. The determinants of gender–specific child survival are investigated through the traditional household production model pioneered by Becker, which is extended to include publicly provided goods as fixed inputs in production decisions. The introduction of government–provided goods provides an avenue for investigating the influence of the state on household decisions. Gender–specific child survival equations are estimated using a robust "seemingly unrelated regression" method. Results using 1981 Indian Census data indicate that increases in female literacy and female labor force participation increase female child survival in rural India. Furthermore, higher ratios of female to male medical technicians are associated with higher female child survival relative to males. This paper demonstrates that a large and effective role exists for government to address excess female morality.     

Descent rules and strategic transfers. Evidence from matrilineal groups in Ghana

Traditional descent systems can roughly be divided into patrilineal and matrilineal. In the latter, a man's heir is not his own child but rather his sister's son. The paper examines the implications of this social norm for the pattern of inter-vivos transfers using household level data from rural Ghana, where the largest ethnic group is traditionally matrilineal. In particular, it tests the predictions of a model of strategic behavior according to which children should respond to the threat of disinheritance by increasing transfers to their parents during lifetime to induce a donation of land before the default (matrilineal) inheritance is enforced. I find that the credibility of customary norms enforcement, as proxied by the presence of a nephew in the father's household, significantly increases the probability of receiving transfers from children for Akans but not for the other groups. The effect is specific to nephews and not to other co-resident boys. This pattern of behavior can affect asset accumulation decisions across generations.     

Household Intertemporal Behaviour: A Collective Characterization and a Test of Commitment

In this paper, a formal test of intra-household commitment is derived and performed. To that end, two models of household intertemporal behaviour are developed. In both models, household members are characterized by individual preferences. In the first formulation, household decisions are always on the ex ante Pareto frontier. In the second model, the assumption of intra-household commitment required by ex ante efficiency is relaxed. It is shown that the full-efficiency household Euler equations are nested in the no-commitment Euler equations. Using this result, the hypothesis that household members can commit to future allocations of resources is tested using the Consumer Expenditure Survey. I strongly reject this hypothesis. It is also shown that the standard unitary framework is a special case of the full-efficiency model. However, if household members are not able to commit, household intertemporal behaviour cannot be characterized using the standard life-cycle model. These findings have two main implications. First, policy makers can change household behaviour by modifying the decision power of individual household members. Second, to evaluate programmes designed to improve the welfare of household members, it would be beneficial to replace the standard unitary model with a characterization of household behaviour that allows for lack of commitment.     

Nonlinear taxes in a life-cycle consistent model of family labour supply

This paper deals with family labour supply under nonlinear income taxation in a life-cycle consistent framework. A major purpose of the paper is, therefore, to bring together previous research on how to model joint supply decisions, life-cycle consistency and piecewise linear taxation, and then perform an econometric application using Swedish cross-section data. The paper starts by constructing an intertemporal model of household behaviour, which is used to derive optimal hours of work for the husband and the wife, respectively. Then, given the appropriate theoretical framework, the model is specified in a way suitable for econometric analysis. Regarding the estimation results, we find that both male and female labour supply are sensitive not only to changes in the own marginal wage rate and the virtual nonlabour income, but also to changes in the marginal wage rate of the spouse. The latter means that cross-wage effects are important when it comes to interpret the consequences of income taxation.     

Intrahousehold moral hazard frictions and household poverty traps in rural India

We empirically study the role of assets held by women in the creation of household wealth using data from rural India. We design a streamlined model of intrahousehold project funding where moral hazard frictions between spouses and women's asset control are the main ingredients. As predicted by the model, the data show that household asset accumulation depends on women's asset control in a non-monotonic way. Results indicate no presence of multiple equilibrium poverty traps, but do show that exogenous negative shocks will trigger assets aggregation within households where both spouses are present. This resilience mechanism is, however, not found in female headed household as these households have a monotonic relationship between women's wealth control and asset creation. We thus argue that policies to support women's empowerment need to distinguish women based on their individual wealth levels and headship status to enhance household well-being in remote Indian communities.     

The Women's Movement Against Sexual Harassment,by Carrie N. Baker

This paper examines some of the effects of East and West German family policy on women's economic position by analyzing intrahousehold bargaining power, defined here as based on co-resident partners' relative fall-back positions, which in turn depend on the individuals' access to income in the event that the partnership ends. East German policy sought to integrate women into the labor force through programs such as free public child care and liberal maternity leave. West Germany based its family policy on the assumption of a stark gender division of labor, with one lifetime breadwinner per family and a second parent who temporarily leaves the labor force to raise children. On the basis of her findings and analysis, the author argues that while East German institutions increased women's bargaining power, gender-specific policies interfered with women's ability to use this power to bring about changes in the household division of labor. West German family policy did not assign gender roles, but it offered women less bargaining power with which to negotiate. The author maintains that society's refusal to address women's greater child-rearing costs is not based on an assessment of such costs and the costs of redistributive government programs, but on the assumption that women should absorb the risks and burdens of reproduction.     

Improving Assessments of Gender Bargaining Power: A Case Study from Bangladesh

Gender bargaining power has entered into mainstream economic theory and public policy. However, common empirical measures are only loosely related to the theoretical concept, and research has not produced consistent results regarding the causal chains underlying women’s empowerment. This study critically examines accepted measures of bargaining power, arguing that participation in specific household decisions is not directly associated with the theoretical concept of bargaining power. The study analyzes the relationship between measures of participation in household decisions and individual and household characteristics thought to contribute to bargaining power. Using Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data on Bangladesh over the period 1999–2011, the study finds that despite the loose relationship of the survey questions to the theoretical construct bargaining power, the decision-making questions provide relatively consistent and theoretically supported measures of this unobservable characteristic. Simple changes in using the measures would contribute to more robust and consistent findings.