The Cost of Children within Marriage: Intra-household Allocations of Time and Consumption

Laurens Cherchye, Bram De Rock and Khushboo Surana

No 2026-15, Working Papers ECARES from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: We use a structural revealed preference (RP) approach to study how fertility isassociated with intra-household allocations and individual welfare within married couples.Building on a collective consumption framework, we jointly model material consumptionand time use under heterogeneous preferences and Pareto-efficient household decisions,using marital stability to identify resource sharing from cross-sectional data. Applyingthe method to the 2023 wave of the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), wefind substantial gender inequality in intra-household allocations, with men consistentlyreceiving more resources. These disparities widen sharply with fertility. Householdswith children exhibit lower material and time welfare for both spouses, but the burdenfalls disproportionately on mothers. Material resources shift moderately, whereas thetime costs of children fall overwhelmingly on women: mothers experience large declinesin leisure and increases in home production time, leading to sharply higher time-povertyrisks and a clear worsening of the underlying welfare distribution. These patterns areespecially pronounced among the highly educated and document a dimension of thecost of children that household-level measures miss

Keywords: fertility; individual welfare; intra-household allocation; revealed preference; material and time poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 D12 D13 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 p.
Date: 2026-05-01
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