on the dixit stiglitz model of monopolistic competition our purpose in this note is to revisit the popular monopolistic competition model of avinash k dixit and joseph e stiglitz 1977 and to stress the fact that the variant of this model used in the recent macroeconomic literature is significantly different from the original in particular by taking n as the number of active monopolists the recent discussion of dixit and stiglitz 1993 and xiaokai yang and ben j heijdra 1993 about the the advantages of neglecting terms of the order 1 n in the computed elasticities is significantly affected by the choice of the variant of the model the basic model presented in section i has been used from the start by dixit and stiglitz to study optimum product diversity it is a simple general equilibrium model with n monopolistic goods and a numeraire good which can be interpreted as labor or leisure time or as the aggregation of all the other goods in the economy the variant of the model analyzed in section ii was independently developed by several authors for different simple applications in macroeconomics 1 it is an enlarged model that includes an additional good interpreted as labor time but not taken as the numeraire more importantly the enlarged model does not lead to a general equilibrium analysis until the wage rate taken as given in a first step is adjusted competitively or strategically it is for the basic model that yang and heijdra 1993 yh give an alternative computation method taking into account the priceindex effect of individual pricing decisions this effect had been neglected in the original paper of dixit and stiglitz 1977 ds who were only concerned with the large n case ensured by low fixed costs and imperfect substitution between the monopolistic goods limiting their model to the special case of a unitary elasticity of substitution between the monopolistic goods and the numeraire good yh obtain an explicit solution but yh s solution is still an approximation because it neglects the indirect effects that feedback has on pricing decisions we will show that in the enlarged model taking into account this income feedback effect allows for an explicit solution and simplifies calculations but in the variant some meaningful cases are incompatible with free entry and thus prohibit the use of ds s approximation however as we conclude in section iii this is not to say that their approximation should never be used on the contrary the approximation hypothesis is a very useful part of dixit and stiglitz s contribution

essays on duopoly competition with asymmetric firms is profit maximization always an evolutionary stable strategy abstract we propose both a well mixed and spatially structured evolutionary game to analyze the competitive behavior of retail firms in duopolistic markets firms from two different populations high low efficiency compete and the available strategies are i profit or ii revenue maximization under bounded rationality assumptions firms can update their behavior through dynamic learning mechanisms in addition to a replicator dynamics approach we develop an agent based model to increase realism and to capture possible spatial effects on firms strategic behavior a convergence between the methods is observed and given specific conditions revenue maximization may corresponds to an evolutionary stable strategy ess

o brother where art thou the effects of having a sibling on geographic mobility and labour market outcomes in most industrialized countries more people than ever are having to cope with the burden of caring for elderly parents this paper formulates a model to explain how parental care responsibilities and family structure interact in affecting children s mobility characteristics a key insight we obtain is that the mobility of young adults crucially depends on the presence of a sibling our explanation is mainly but not exclusively based on a sibling power effect siblings compete in location and employment decisions so as to direct parental care decisions at later stages towards their preferred outcome only children are not exposed to this kind of competition this causes an equilibrium in which siblings not only exhibit higher mobility than only children but also have better labor market outcomes using data from the german socio economic panel study soep and from the american national survey of families and households nsfh we find strong evidence that confirms these patterns the implications of our results are then discussed in the context of current population trends in europe and the united states

caregivers in the family daughters sons and social norms daughters are the principal caregivers of their dependent parents in this paper we study long term care ltc choices by bargaining families with mixed or same gender siblings ltc care can be provided either informally by children or formally at home or in an institution a social norm implies that daughters suffer a psychological cost when they provide less informal care than the average child we show that the laissez faire lf and the utilitarian first best fb differ for two reasons first because informal care imposes a negative externality on daughters via the social norm too much informal care is provided in lf second the weights children and parents have in the family bargaining problem might differ in general from their weights in social welfare we show that the fb allocation can be achieved through a system of subsidies on formal home and institutional care except when children and parents have equal bargaining weights these subsidies are gender speci fic and refl ect pigouvian as well as paternalistic considerations

transfer behavior in the health and retirement study measurement and the redistribution of resources within the family recent work by a number of economists has opened a debate about the role played by intergenerational transfers using the new health and retirement study hrs we are better able to address the issues involved contrary to the current literature on bequests we do not find that parents give transfers equally to all children rather we find that in the case of inter vivos transfers respondents give greaterfinancial assistance to their less well off children than to their children with higher incomes financial transfers to elderly parents are also found to be negatively related to the potential recipient s income these results hold both for the incidence of transfers and for the amounts in addition we allow for unobserved differences across families by estimating fixed effect models and find our results to be robust to these specifications a comparison of the hrs transfer data to other survey data demonstrates that the hrs is potentially quite useful for research on transfer behavior

economic development and the family structure from the pater familias to the nuclear family we provide a theory that is able to account for the observed comovement between the shift in intergenerational living arrangements from coresidence to non coresidence and economic development our theory is consistent with the diminution in the status of the elderly documented by some sociologists the results from our analysis show that when technical progress is fast enough the economy experiences a shift from stagnation to growth there is a transition from coresidence to non coresidence and the social status of the elderly tends to deteriorate

the strategic bequest motive although recent research suggests that intergenerational transfers play an important role in aggregate capital accumulation our understanding of bequest motives remains incomplete we develop a simple model of strategic bequests in which a testator influences the decisions of his beneficiaries by holding wealth in bequeathable forms and by conditioning the division of bequests on the beneficiaries actions the model generates falsifiable empirical predictions that are inconsistent with other theories of intergenerational transfers we present econometric and other evidence that strongly suggests that bequests are often used as compensation for services rendered by beneficiaries

inter vivos transfers and intergenerational exchange the surge of interest in intergenerational transfers in the past decade has sparked a debate over the motivation for them are transfers given out of altruism or part of an exchange while each motive is probably at work to some extent we know little about whether one motive predominates the question is relevant for issues concerning public income redistribution and inequality in the family but despite its importance empirical evidence about motives is scarce because of limited data we investigate a new data set the national survey of families and households which remedies many of the shortcomings of other data sets containing private transfer information we find that empirical patterns for inter vivos transfers i e transfers between living persons are more consistent with exchange than altruism

is the japanese extended family altruistically linked a test based on engel curves altruism has the well known neutrality implication that the family s demand for commodities is invariant to the division of resources within the family i test this by estimating engel curves on a cross section of japanese extended families forming two generation households i find that the pattern of food expenditure is significantly affected by the division of resources the food components whose budget share increases with the older generation s share of household income are precisely those favored by the old such as cereal seafood and vegetables

unpaid work and conformity why care we study the supply of unpaid eldercare in particular caring for parents in the uk focusing on both the division of care and caring tasks by gender and the effect of conformity to social norms in relation to caring we then investigate the effect of the amount of care on the well being of caregivers and whether agreeing with the care norm enhances their well being our results suggest that the eldercare reform neglects important aspects underlying the distribution of care hours and care tasks between caregivers and may potentially worsen intrahousehold inequality in earnings and well being in particular between men and women

spillover effect of japanese long term care insurance as an employment promotion policy for family caregivers we evaluate a spillover effect of the japanese public long term care insurance ltci as a policy to stimulate family caregivers labor force participation using nationally representative data from 1995 to 2013 we apply difference in difference propensity score matching to investigate the spillover effect in two periods before and after the introduction of the ltci in 2000 and before and after its major amendment in 2006 our results show that the ltci introduction has significant and positive spillover effects on family caregivers labor force participation and the effects vary by gender and age in contrast the ltci amendment is found to have generally negative spillover effects on their labor force participation we draw attention to these spillover effects as expanding labor market supply to sustain the economy would be a priority for japan and other rapidly aging countries in the coming decades

identification of the oligopoly solution concept in a differentiated products industry a central part of the new empirical industrial organization has been the study of market power in homogenous product industries this paper discusses extension of these methods to differentiated products industries the requirements for identification of conjectural variation parameters are shown to be hard to satisfy in practice an alternative menu approach is discussed 1998 elsevier science s a

intergenerational household formation female labor supply and informal caregiving a bargaining approach children s provision of in kind services to their elderly parents informal caregiving represents an important form of economic transfers to the elderly in this paper we develop and estimate a joint model of informal caregiving and labor force participation decisions of adult daughters who have a frail elderly parent in a broader framework of intergenerational household formation parent and daughter agree to a nash bargaining rule as the solution to the household formation and intrahousehold decision making process however rather than severed relationships the threat point is given by a noncooperative equilibrium defined in terms of voluntary contributions toward a public good the parental well being maximum likelihood parameter estimates derived from the simultaneous multiequation endogenous switching model are generally consistent with expectations our results indicate that competing demands on daughters time reduce both coresidence and informal caregiving we also find that intergenerational coresidence is an important mode of assistance to elderly persons a simulation based on the estimated parameters suggests that public programs designed to meet the long term care needs of elderly persons by subsidizing formal home care services may have substantial effects on intergenerational living and care arrangement decisions

caregiving to elderly parents and employment status of european mature women abstract we study the prevalence of informal caregiving to elderly parents by their mature daughters in europe and the links between parental health intense daily caregiving and the employment status of daughters we group data from share into three country pools north central and south which differ in the availability of public formal care services and female labor market attachment there is a strong north south gradient in the positive effect of parental ill health on the probability of daily caregiving the loss of employment ascribable to daily informal caregiving seems negligible except in southern countries we use a time allocation model to provide a link to an empirical iv treatment effects framework and to interpret our findings

the effect of informal care on work and wages cross sectional evidence in the united states finds that informal caregivers have less attachment to the labor force the causal mechanism is unclear do children who work less become informal caregivers or are children who become caregivers working less using longitudinal data from the health and retirement study we identify the relationship between informal care and work in the united states both on the intensive and extensive margins and examine wage effects we control for time invariant individual heterogeneity rule out or control for endogeneity examine effects for men and women separately and analyze heterogeneous effects by task and intensity we find modest decreases 2 4 percentage points in the likelihood of working for male caregivers providing personal care female chore caregivers meanwhile are more likely to be retired for female care providers who remain working we find evidence that they decrease work by 3 10hours per week and face a 3 percent lower wage than non caregivers we find little effect of caregiving on working men s hours or wages these estimates suggest that the opportunity costs to informal care providers are important to consider when making policy recommendations about the design and funding of public long term care programs

observable preferences for public goods a note on the incentive compatibility of inferring demand for public goods from private goods demand abstract bradford and hildebrandt show that under certain conditions preferences for public goods can be inferred from the demand for complementary private goods they conjecture that their method overcomes consumers incentives to misrepresent their public goods preferences but this paper shows that in general this is not the case

monetary transfers from children and the labour supply of elderly parents evidence from vietnam in the absence of a broad based pension scheme the elderly in developing countries may rely on monetary transfers made by their children and on their own labour supply this article examines whether monetary transfers from children help to reduce elderly parents need to work taking the possible endogeneity of children s transfers in the parents labour supply into account and using maximum likelihood methods and vietnamese data we find that monetary transfers help the elderly cope with risks associated with old age or illness at the same time however monetary transfers are not sufficient to fully substitute for parents labour supply

the chicken or the egg endogeneity in labour market participation of informal carers in england around 14 of the uk labour force has informal care responsibilities and almost everyone in society will be an informal carer in their lifetime a well known fact in the small economic literature on informal care is the apparent negative relation between care responsibilities and labour market participation yet caring and labour market participation may be endogenous using an instrumental variable approach and panel data techniques and employing data from the british household panel study from 1991 to 2002 this paper shows that not accommodating for endogeneity in the labour market participation equation may significantly overestimate the impact care exhibits on the employment decision of informal carers moreover it is shown that a negative impact on employment only applies to some care types policy implications are derived

competition for market share or for market size oligopolistic equilibria with varying competitive toughness for an industry producing a composite commodity we propose a comprehensive concept of oligopolistic equilibrium allowing for a parameterized continuum of regimes varying in competitive toughness each firm sets simultaneously its price and its quantity under two constraints relative to its market share and to market size the price and the quantity equilibrium outcomes always belong to the set of oligopolistic equilibria when firms are identical and we let their number increase any sequence of symmetric oligopolistic equilibria converges to the monopolistic competition outcome further results are derived in the symmetric ces case concerning in particular the collusive solution enforceability

another theorem on using market demands to determine willingness to pay for non traded goods abstract this paper contains a proof of the following theorem let e1 and e1 denote an agent s expenditures on two groups of goods which are substitutes and complements to a non traded good suppose that both the agent s income and the quantity of the non traded good provided him have a positive effect on these two amounts then these effects can be used to place upper and lower bounds on the agent s marginal willingness to pay for the non traded good

housing and location choices of retiring households evidence from france in this paper a study is made of the mobility and housing choices of the elderly when retiring using household data collected in france from a theoretical viewpoint individuals are likely to decrease their housing quantity because of an income loss when retiring but they may also increase it to benefit from more housing comfort for leisure using the 1992 trois generations survey it is first shown that housing mobility at retirement is substantial in france with a variety of self reported motives then using the 1994 2001 french europanel survey evidence is found of both upsizing and downsizing for mobile recent retirees in many cases housing adjustments lead to a correction of the initial disequilibrium between the number of rooms and the number of occupants however a significant proportion of mobile recent retirees improve the quality of their dwelling

who will care employment participation and willingness to supply informal care the impact of informal care responsibilities on the willingness and ability of caregivers to undertake paid employment has been the subject of a number of studies in contrast the effect of employment status on willingness to undertake informal care has been less well explored this paper concentrates on this less studied direction of causality using the data provided by 15 waves of the british household panel survey we find that employment participation and earnings both impact negatively on willingness to supply informal care this evidence has implications for health and social care policy since informal care has been shown to be a significant substitute for formal long term care

the opportunity costs of informal care does gender matter in this paper we investigate the costs borne by both male and female carers in terms of their forgone formal employment opportunities traditionally informal care was supplied by women but nowadays women are not only more likely to work but also likely to be significant contributors to family finances for women this implies that the size of any forgone earnings cost of informal care is increasing at the same time population ageing is making for increasing numbers requiring care from a policy perspective it is therefore helpful to consider a less traditional but nevertheless important source of informal care men we find that both male and female carers bear indirect costs in that they are less likely to be in paid work than otherwise similar non carers and when they are in paid work they earn significantly less however we find that the motivation for lower employment participation is not the same for men as it is for women

the labour market costs of community care this paper reports an empirical investigation into the influence of informal care responsibilities on the labour supply of women the objective is to examine the argument that the uk policy of caring for the chronic sick in the community involves a nontrivial opportunity cost in the form of the forgone labour supply of the informal carers upon which it relies we find that informal carers who care for less than 20 h per week are in fact more likely to participate in the labour market but tend to work for fewer hours per week than otherwise similar noncarers informal carers who care for 20 h or more a week are less likely to participate but only slightly however when they do undertake formal employment they tend to earn less per hour and work for fewer hours per week

on measuring the value of a nonmarket good using market data we use line integral theory to lay out in a more general theoretical framework the conditions under which it is possible to measure with market data the welfare effects of a change in a nonmarket good we present in detail a numerical method of measuring the value of nonmarket goods using market data under either weak neutrality or weak complementarity our numerical method is more flexible than the existing analytical method because it can be used with any well behaved marshallian demand function and can be used even when the willig condition does not hold

oligopolistic competition as a common agency game oligopolistic competition is analyzed in a complete information multi principal common agency framework where principals are firms supplying differentiated goods and the agent is a representative consumer we first propose a canonical formulation of common agency games and a parameterization of the set of equilibria based on the lagrange multipliers associated with the participation and the incentive compatibility constraints of each principal this is used to characterize the set of equilibria in the intrinsic and non intrinsic games the former includes the latter as well as the standard price and quantity equilibrium outcomes it may also include the collusive solution

collective labor supply and welfare the paper develops a general collective model of household labor supply in which agents are characterized by their own possibly altruistic preferences and household decisions are only assumed to be pareto efficient an alternative interpretation is that there are two stages in the internal decision process agents first share nonlabor income according to some given sharing rule then each one optimally chooses his or her own labor supply and consumption this setting is shown to generate testable restrictions on labor supplies moreover the observation of labor supply behavior is sufficient for recovering individual preferences and the sharing rule up to a constant finally the traditional tools of welfare analysis can be adapted to the new setting

the supply of children s time to disabled elderly parents i introduction in recent years economists have become increasingly interested in intergenerational transfers of both time and money 1 such transfers may be motivated by altruism or exchange models of altruism assume that a person s utility depends on the consumption or utility of other family members and her own consumption for example children may supply unpaid informal care to aging parents because their utility increases when their parents are happier one of the most striking predictions of models of altruism is that public subsidies tend to crowd out transfers by altruistic individuals especially if the subsidy is financed by taxing the altruistic individual becker 1974 in exchange models there is typically altruism but one family member such as a parent can induce a relative such as a child or kid 2 to provide more services or money than the relative would normally provide by threatening to withhold a bequest to the extent that this is so one would plausibly expect more care and attention to be provided to wealthy parents when there is more than one kid more care should be provided because the threat of disinheritance is more credible when there is competition between kids for bequests in a well known article bernheim shleifer and summers 1985 hereafter referred to as bss found empirical support for the strategic bequest motive based on an observed positive relationship between children s visits and telephone calls to elderly parents per child as the measure of attention and bequeathable wealth per child as the measure of the financial motivation for providing such attention one might expect this result to extend to decisions about direct provision of help informal care that kids may provide to parents the marginal benefit of such care is plausibly greater than the benefit derived from a visit or telephone call in a recent article however we found no evidence that the strategic bequest motive is an important determinant of the amount of informal care kids provide or a related decision whether or not to place the parent in a nursing home sloan hoerger and picone 1996 we focused on the distinction between cognitively aware parents who can threaten to disinherit their kids and cognitively unaware parents who cannot disinherit and examined whether this distinction had any effect on the probability that the parent entered a nursing home or on amounts of formal and informal care received if the parent remained in the community any strategic effects were swamped by the greater marginal benefit of care to the parent when the parent was cognitively unaware moreover among the cognitively aware richer parents actually received less informal care contrary to the strategic model s predictions unfortunately in past research on intergenerational transfers of time and money it was not possible to control for the wealth wage and other characteristics of kids to the extent that kid s wealth and wage were positively correlated with parent s wealth which was observed the parameter estimates on parent s wealth may be negatively biased although parent s wealth and kid s wealth and wage rates are plausibly positively correlated they have opposite effects on the supply of kid s time according to the strategic bequest model that is potential bequests from a parent may be less attractive to rich kids and therefore induce less care we test the strategic bequest model using information on elderly parents and their children from two linked surveys the 1989 national long term care survey nltcs for elderly individuals and the survey of informal caregivers sic for a subsample of the elderly s children using these data we can include explicit measures of kid s wealth and wage rates thereby avoiding the possible bias introduced by a correlation between parent s and kid s wealth and wages also the data sets provide information on several pertinent health cognitive and functional status variables which are not typically observed in surveys of financial status

do they care too much to work the influence of caregiving intensity on the labour force participation of unpaid caregivers in canada the recent growth of the home care sector combined with societal and demographic changes have given rise to concerns about the adequacy of the supply of family and friend caregivers potential caregivers face competing time pressures that pull them in the direction of the labour market on one hand and towards unpaid caregiving duties on the other this paper examines the influence of unpaid caregiving on the labour supply of a cohort of working aged caregivers in canada with particular emphasis on caregiving intensity results suggest that caregivers are heterogeneous in both their caregiving inputs and associated labour market responses thereby underscoring the importance of controlling for caregiving intensity when measuring labour supply the negative influence of primary caregiving on labour supply appears to be at the level of labour force participation rather than on hours of work or wages

on the efficiency of bertrand and cournot equilibria with product differentation in a differentiated products setting with n varieties it is shown under certain regularity conditions that if the demand structure is symmetric and bertrand and cournot equilibria are unique then prices and profits are larger and quantities smaller in cournot than in bertrand competition and as n grows both equilibria converge to the efficient outcome at a rate of at least 1n if bertrand reaction functions slope upwards and are continuous then even with an asymmetric demand structure given any cournot equilibrium price vector one can find a bertrand equilibrium with lower prices in particular if the bertrand equilibrium is unique then it has lower prices than any cournot equilibrium

bounds on the willingness to pay for non traded goods a possibility theorem abstract this note contains a proof of the following theorem if an agent s preferences for traded goods are known and if the quantity of a non traded good provided him alters his demand for traded goods then it is possible to place bounds on his willingness to pay for increments in this quantity

dynamic wage and employment effects of elder parent care this article formulates and estimates a dynamic discrete choice model of elder parent care and work to analyze how caregiving affects a woman s current and future labor force participation and wages the model incorporates parental health changes human capital accumulation and job offer availability the estimates indicate that women face low probabilities of returning to work or increasing work hours after a caregiving spell i use the estimated model to simulate the caregiving employment and welfare effects of a longer unpaid work leave than currently available under the family and medical leave act a paid leave and a caregiver allowance

the allocation of resources in intergenerational households adult children and their elderly parents resource pooling in intergenerational households was tested to ascertain the potential policy implications for the welfare of elderly adults currently unmarried elderly respondents from a total of 583 households who resided with one of their adult children were included based on the survey of assets and health dynamics a nationally representative sample of community resident persons aged 70 and older in 1993 total household non labor income and the childs non labor income was measured in addition to the value of housing assets and home ownership the regression results provided strong evidence that the intergenerational households do not behave in a way that is consistent with common preference models income under the childs control had a sizable and statistically significant effect on intra household allocation increases in the childs non labor income decreased both the probability of the childs full time work and the probability of providing parental care as the childs control of resources increased more time was allocated to activities other than labor supply and parental care neither of the income variables had a significant impact on the parents use of formal care the childs income had a significant positive effect on the households demand for prescription drugs for the parent with respect to parental dental visits although the parameter estimate for total household income exhibited the expected positive and significant effect the coefficient on childs income was statistically insignificant at conventional levels p 0 17 home ownership had a significant effect on the childs allocation of time to market work two simulations involving the shifting of resource control within the household and providing additional cash assistance to eligible families suggested that resource control has a significant impact on labor supply and informal care cash transfer to coresident children might result in lower total care than policies which provide additional resources directly to the parent

competition market selection and growth we study the effect of the competitive selection process on the economy s rate of growth in an extension of standard quality ladder models of endogenous growth we allow for the possibility that in each period several asymmetric firms representing an endogenously determined number of past innovators may be simultaneously active in an industry stronger competitive pressure then has conflicting effects on the incentive to innovate lowering prices but also selecting the more efficient firms we show that the market selection effect of competition always increases the incentive to innovate and find circumstances in which it can outweigh the traditional negative effect of lower prices

the joint determination of household membership and market work the case of young men except in special cases market work and household membership are jointly chosen a nash bargaining model of family behavior is used to specify stochastic structural relationships two indirect utility functions and a market and a reservation wage function that jointly determine work consumption and household membership the maximum likelihood estimates of the implied trinomial probit model differ sharply from those obtained when either market work or household membership is taken as exogenous this application to white male youths from the national longitudinal surveys shows the insurance function of families parents insure their sons against poor market opportunities

intensity of competition and the incentive to innovate abstract the effects of intensity of product market competition on r d incentives are analysed in a model capturing the strategic interactions between firms with different cost levels first four axioms are proposed that a measure of intensity of competition should satisfy then the effects of intensity of competition on the value of the innovation are analysed and it is shown that the axioms imply the existence of a non monotone relation between intensity of competition and the value of an innovation

the empirical content of cournot competition we consider the testable implications of the cournot model of market competition our approach is nonparametric in the sense that we abstain from imposing any functional specification on market demand and firm cost functions we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for reduced form equilibrium market price and quantity functions to be consistent with the cournot model in addition we present identification results for the corresponding inverse market demand function and the firm cost functions finally we use our approach to derive testable restrictions for the models of perfect competition collusion and conjectural variations this identifies the conditions under which these different models are empirically distinguishable from the cournot model we also investigate empirical issues measurement error and omitted variables related to bringing our testable restrictions to data

informal care and long term labor market outcomes in this paper we estimate long run effects of informal care provision on female caregivers labor market outcomes up to eight years after care provision we compare a static version where average effects of care provision in a certain year on later labor market outcomes are estimated to a partly dynamic version where the effects of up to three consecutive years of care provision are analyzed our results suggest that there are significant initial negative effects of informal care provision on the probability to work full time the reduction in the probability to work full time by 4 percentage points or 2 4 5 0 if we move from point to partial identification is persistent over time short run effects on hourly wages are zero but we find considerable long run wage penalties

separate spheres bargaining and the marriage market this paper introduces the separate spheres bargaining model a new model of distribution within marriage it differs from divorce threat bargaining models e g manser brown mcelroy horney in that the threat point is not divorce but a noncooperative equilibrium within marriage this noncooperative equilibrium reflects traditional gender roles the predictions of our model thus differ from those of divorce threat bargaining models in the separate spheres model cash transfer payments to the mother and payments to the father can but need not imply different equilibrium distributions in existing marriages in the long run the distributional effects of transfer policies may be substantially altered by changes in the marriage market equilibrium

income and outcomes a structural model of intrahousehold allocation there is evidence from several sources that one cannot treat many person households as a single decision maker if this is the case then factors such as the relative incomes of the household members may affect the final allocation decisions made by the household we develop a method of identifying how incomes affect outcomes given conventional family expenditure data the basic assumption we make is that household decision processes lead to efficient outcomes we apply our method to a sample of canadian couples with no children we find that the final allocations of expenditures on each partner depend significantly on their relative incomes and ages and on the level of lifetime wealth

is the extended family altruistically linked direct tests using micro data this paper uses panel study of income dynamics data on parents and their adult children to test the standard altruism model this model predicts that within the extended family the distribution of consumption is independent of the distribution of resources the authors findings strongly reject this prediction copyright 1992 by american economic association