Allocating Time: Individuals' Technologies, Household Technology, Perfect Substitutes, and Specialization

Robert Pollak

No 17529, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In an efficient household if the spouses' time inputs are perfect substitutes, then spouses will "specialize" regardless of their preferences and the governance structure. That is, both spouses will not allocate time to both household production and the market sector. The perfect substitutes assumption implies that spouses' "unilateral" production functions (i.e., the household production function when only one spouse allocates time to home production) are closely related, satisfying a highly restrictive condition that I call "compatibility." I introduce the "correspondence assumption," which postulates that the unilateral production functions in a newly formed household coincide with individuals' production functions before they enter marriage. The correspondence assumption provides a plausible account of the genesis of household technology and simplifies its estimation. I introduce the "additivity assumption" which postulates that the household production function is the sum of the spouses' unilateral production functions and argue that additivity is implicit in much of the new home economics. Together, the correspondence and additivity assumptions imply that individuals' technologies reveal the entire household technology. I show that perfect substitutes, additivity and concavity imply that the household production function is of the same form as the unilateral production functions, exhibits constant returns to scale, and depends on the spouses' total time inputs, measured in efficiency units.

JEL-codes: D13 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis and nep-lma
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Published as Robert A. Pollak, 2012. "Allocating Time: Individuals' Technologies, Household Technology, Perfect Substitutes, and Specialization," Annals of Economics and Statistics, .

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17529.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Allocating Time: Individuals' Technologies, Household Technology, Perfect Substitutes, and Specialization (2012)
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:nbr:nberwo:17529

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17529

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().