The systems approach to household labor supply in the Netherlands

Summary Deaton and Muellbauer's `Almost Ideal Demand System' is employed to model the joint determination of family income and male and female labor supply of individual households in the Netherlands. Family composition effects are incorporated as quasi-price effects, as originally proposed by Batten. The model is estimated for a cross-section of households in the Netherlands in 1982, to explain both actual hours of work and preferred hours of work. An analysis of the effects of rationing of male labor supply, by a mandatory reduction of the length of the working week, points to a sizeable compensating effect on female labor supply.The authors thank Jacques Siegers, Joop Hartog, Tom Wansbeek and a referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Geert Ridder kindly provided his maximum likelihood computer program GRMAX, which was used in the estimation of the model.