Time-use, domestic production and public goods in the intra-household decision process: Theoretical, empirical and experimental approaches

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The purpose of this project is to obtain a deeper understanding of household behavior concerning labor supply and consumption, by extending the micro-economic theory of the household, adapting innovative econometric methods in order to estimate more realistic models, and using information from new survey data and original experiments.Vast efforts have recently been devoted to represent the family in a realistic fashion and develop strategies for the identification of both the individual preferences and the bargaining position of each member of the family. In this perspective, collective models appear to offer a convenient setting. However, the existing studies typically neglect the presence of children, assimilate nonmarket time to pure leisure and do not consider public transfers, potentially leading to bias in the measurement of intra-family welfare inequalities, and in estimates of the parameters of household decision rules.Therefore, we propose to:develop collective models internalizing household production, non-participation in the labor market, private and public consumption, and produce welfare inequality measures accounting for every member in the household;investigate econometric methods which allow considering complex tax-benefit systems in a collective framework, and avoiding the usual strong assumptions when estimating the determinants of the consumption choices, and apply these models and methods to various data sets for France, Germany, the UK and the US;- test for income pooling on the basis of experiments, in order to gain deeper insights into the determinants of household behavior.In a concluding study, we will summarize all results obtained in the project for France and Germany, and, if possible, explain some of the differences between the two countries as regards family issues.