Opening the Black Box of Intrahousehold Decision Making: Theory and Nonparametric Empirical Tests of General Collective Consumption Models

By Laurens Cherchye, B. De Rock, Frederic Vermeulen. Journal of Political Economy, 2009

127 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We provide “revealed preference” tests of general collective consumption models that account for public consumption and externalities within the household. We further propose a novel approach to model special cases of this model, which imply alternative assumptions regarding the sharing rule. Our application uses the panel data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. We find that the general model, together with a large class of special cases, cannot be rejected. By contrast, we do reject the standard unitary model. Since our tests are entirely nonparametric, this provides strong evidence in favor of models focusing on intrahousehold decision making.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/162103a30817e132909e2ba606f21d8bf13c8a83

Citations in the corpus

• Divorce Risk, Wages and Working Wives: A Quantitative Life‐Cycle Analysis of Female Labour Force Participation (2014, unknown): “In future work, it may be interesting to explore the effect of wage on bargaining strengths; see Cherchye et al. (2009) for a discussion of empirical evidence on fixed Pareto weights.”
• The Schooling Decision: Family Preferences, Intergenerational Conflict, and Moral Hazard in the Brazilian Favelas (2012, unknown): “Cherchye, De Rock, and Vermeulen (2009) test general collective consumption models and reject the standard unitary model.”