H J K L (House,Job, Kids and Leisure) or the daily life of women in France in the late sixties: an economist's view

The paper tests some of the implications of the Theory of the Allocation of Time, comparing in particular the behaviour of working and non working women. Special emphasis is put on the impact of the presence (number and age) of children, this variable being assumed to act as an efficiency change (the analysis is similar to that ofMichael concerning the effect of education on consumption). Data were obtained from a Time Budget Survey conducted in France in 1967. It appears that the age of the children has a much stronger impact on the women's allocation of time than the number of children, that time spent with children does not really vary with the educational level of the mother, and that hours of work first increase then decrease with the number of years of schooling of the mother.     

On the measurement of differences in the commodity composition of imports or exports

Conclusion Following earlier reservations concerning the use of Glejser et al.’s index, this paper has attempted to show that Glejser et al.’s basic ideas concerning the measurement of the extent of specialization in imports and exports did not depend on the use of a specific index. Any measure of the inequality of the ratios (M _i/M_gi) defined earlier (and similarly for exports) could, in fact, be used. The empirical section of this paper, which looked at the commodity composition of the exports and imports of Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom, before and after they joined the EEC, confirmed that there was a positive correlation between the various indices proposed.     

Gini's “Transvariazione” and the measurement of distance between distributions

This paper notes that Gini's concept of Transvariazione corresponds to the idea of overlapping of distributions. It shows that this concept is implicit in some measures of income inequality such as the Pietra and Gini Index and is at the basis of various measures of distance between distributions. An empirical illustration is provided, based on Israeli data for the period 1978–1994.