Estimating Consumption Economies of Scale, Adult Equivalence Scales, and Household Bargaining Power

Martin Browning, Pierre Chiappori () and Arthur Lewbel ()

No 2003-12, CAM Working Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. Centre for Applied Microeconometrics

Abstract: How much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married? What percentage of a married couple’s expenditures are controlled by the husband? How much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus living apart? We propose and estimate a collective model of household behavior that permits identification and estimation of concepts such as these. We model households in terms of the utility functions of its members, a bargaining or social welfare function, and a consumption technology function. We demonstrate generic nonparametric identification of the model, and hence of equivalence scales, consumption economies of scale, household members’ bargaining power and other related concepts.

Keywords: consumer demand; collective model; adult equivalence scales; household bargaining; economies of scale; demand systems; bargaining power; Barten scales (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D11 D12 C30 I31 D63 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-mic
Date: 2003-12
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.ku.dk/CAM/Files/workingpapers/2003/2003-12_Martin_Browning.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Estimating Consumption Economies of Scale, Adult Equivalence Scales, and Household Bargaining Power (2006)
Working Paper: Estimating Consumption Economies of Scale, Adult Equivalence Scales, and Household Bargaining Power (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kud:kuieca:2003_12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAM Working Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. Centre for Applied Microeconometrics
Address: Øster Farimagsgade 5, Building 26, DK-1353 Copenhagen K., Denmark
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Henriette Aabo Hansen ().