Collective Labor Supply and Housework with Non-Participation of Women in Paid Labor

Chris Klaveren, H. Maassen van den Brink and Bernard van Praag

No 28, Working Papers from Top Institute for Evidence Based Education Research

Abstract: We estimate a collective time allocation model, where two-earner households behave as if the spouses maximize a household utility function, and where one-earner households, where only the man works, behave as if the spouses maximize a household utility function, conditional on the zero job-hour choice of the woman. We find that the shape of the individual indifference curves are mainly influenced by leisure and the household income. For one-earner households, also household production is important and this is because there are relatively more children in these households. Differences between one-earner and two-earner households seem to reflect the difference in specialization behavior of the spouses. Women in one-earner households have more bargaining power than their partner, and we find the opposite for two-earner households. The bargaining position in two-earner households is determined by the individual wages, while for one-earner households, it is determined by the wage rate of the man, the number of children and age. Finally, we evaluate how one extra hour of female labor supply influences the household and the individual utility levels, assuming that the labor supply of women may be non-optimal for both one and two-earner households. An increase of the woman's labor hours would be a Pareto improvement for two-earner households. For one-earner households, we find that an extra hour of labor is beneficial for the household and for the woman, but not for the man.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tierweb.nl/assets/files/UM/Collective%2 ... d%20housework(1).pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.tierweb.nl:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
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:tir:wpaper:28

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Top Institute for Evidence Based Education Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jessica Segal ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).