Intrafamily Bargaining and Household Decisions
Intrafamily Bargaining and Household Decisions

Author: Notburga Ott

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 3642457088

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A model of household decisions based on a bargaining approach is developed providing a comprehensive framework for the analysis of family behavior. Treating the family as an economic organization, household behavior is explained by the cooperation of utility maximizing individuals. The difference to traditional microeconomic household models is that theassumption of a joint household utility function is abandoned. Instead of this, a game theoretic approach is used to model family decisions as a result of intrafamily bargaining. Considering the development of the spouses` human capital in a dynamic approach, the long-term effects of intrafamily specialization in market work and work at home are analyzed. Onemajor finding is that in a dynamic setting non-Pareto efficient allocations may result. Empirical tests demonstrate the relevanace of the bargaining approach.

Spousal Employment and Intra-Household Bargaining Power
Spousal Employment and Intra-Household Bargaining Power

Author: Francisca Antman

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 11

ISBN-13:

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This paper considers the relationship between work status and decision-making power of the head of household and his spouse. I use household fixed effects models to address the possibility that spousal work status may be correlated with unobserved factors that also affect bargaining power within the home. Consistent with the hypothesis that greater economic resources yield greater bargaining power, I find that the spouse of the head of household is more likely to be involved in decisions when she has been employed. Similarly, the head of household is less likely to be the sole decision-maker when his spouse works.

Culture and Household Decision Making
Culture and Household Decision Making

Author: Sonia Oreffice

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 32

ISBN-13:

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This study investigates how spouses' cultural backgrounds mediate the role of intra-household bargaining in the labor supply decisions of foreign-born and US-born couples, in a collective-household framework. Using data from the 2000 US Census, I show that the hours worked by US-born couples, and by those foreign-born coming from countries with gender roles similar to the US, are significantly related to common bargaining power forces such as differences between spouses in age and non-labor income, controlling for both spouses' demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Households whose culture of origin supports strict and unequal gender roles do not exhibit any association of these power factors with their labor supply decisions. This cultural asymmetry suggests that spousal attributes are assessed differently across couples within the US, and that how spouses make use of their outside opportunities and economic and institutional environment may depend on their ethnicities.

Economics of the Family
Economics of the Family

Author: Martin Browning

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-06-05

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 1107728924

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The family is a complex decision unit in which partners with potentially different objectives make consumption, work and fertility decisions. Couples marry and divorce partly based on their ability to coordinate these activities, which in turn depends on how well they are matched. This book provides a comprehensive, modern and self-contained account of the research in the growing area of family economics. The first half of the book develops several alternative models of family decision making. Particular attention is paid to the collective model and its testable implications. The second half discusses household formation and dissolution and who marries whom. Matching models with and without frictions are analyzed and the important role of within-family transfers is explained. The implications for marriage, divorce and fertility are discussed. The book is intended for graduate students in economics and for researchers in other fields interested in the economic approach to the family.

Economic and Social Status in Household Decision Making
Economic and Social Status in Household Decision Making

Author: Chin-Oh Chang

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 24

ISBN-13:

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Models of the allocation of household resources use as a decision rule either the maximization of a household utility function (Becker, 1984) or the solution to a Nash-bargaining game (McElroy and Horney, 1981). To date the mobility literature has exclusively utilized the former approach to analyze the household's decision to change location. This is despite the strong empirical evidence that allocations in other areas are more consistent with the bargaining model. In this paper we use micro-data from Taipei, Taiwan to determine which approach is most appropriate for studying housing mobility decisions. We compare the mobility decisions of nuclear and different types of extended family households to test whether the social and economic roles of different generations affect the household decision process, as is consistent with the bargaining approach. In doing so, we analyze household mobility with a richer description of household structure than is found in the current literature, which implicitly treats households as either a nuclear family or some smaller unit. Our results support the bargaining model of household decision making. Conditional probabilities differ between nuclear and extended families, when a member of the eldest generation in an extended household is the household head, and when a member of the eldest generation contributes to household earnings.