Stereotypes upon abilities in domestic production and household behaviour

Catherine Sofer () and Claire Thibout ()
Additional contact information
Claire Thibout: Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne et INED, https://centredeconomiesorbonne.cnrs.fr

Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne

Abstract: The collective model assumes that decisions taken inside the family are Pareto optimal. However, empirical studies cast doubts upon the efficiency assumption, especially on the production side of household decision making. In this paper, we present a model of household behavior including a stereotype about the ability of men and women in the production of domestic goods. At the beginning of couple formation, we assume that the distribution of abilities in domesticc of men and women is the same, but everybody believes that women are more able (the stereotype). One member of the couple is then chosen to make an investment in domestic production, which increases his/her productivity. Couples decide who will invest by maximizing the expected profit from domestic production, which depends on a signal and on the stereotype. Even though spouses aim at maximizing the household welfare, the resulting allocation is not Pareto efficient. This result leads to examine the role of public policies to restore the first best optimum, as well as equity

Keywords: Stereotypes; household production; time allocation; household behavior; intra-household decision-making (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 J16 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2011-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2011/11075.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Stereotypes upon abilities in domestic production and household behaviour (2011)
Working Paper: Stereotypes upon abilities in domestic production and household behaviour (2011)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mse:cesdoc:11075

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Label ().