Arbeitspapier

Marital Matching, Economies of Scale and Intrahousehold Allocations

We propose a novel structural method to empirically identify economies of scale in household consumption. We assume collective households with consumption technologies that define the public and private nature of expenditures through Barten scales. Our method recovers the technology by solely exploiting preference information revealed by households' consumption behavior. The method imposes no parametric structure on household decision processes, accounts for unobserved preference heterogeneity across individuals in different households, and requires only a single consumption observation per household. Our main identifying assumption is that the observed marital matchings are stable. We apply our method to data drawn from the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), for which we assume that similar households (in terms of observed characteristics like age or region of residence) operate on the same marriage market and are characterized by a homogeneous consumption technology. This application shows that our method yields informative results on the nature of scale economies and intrahousehold allocation patterns. In addition, it allows us to define individual compensation schemes required to preserve the same consumption level in case of marriage dissolution or spousal death.

Sprache
Englisch

Erschienen in
Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 10242

Klassifikation
Wirtschaft
Consumer Economics: Theory
Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
Household Production and Intrahousehold Allocation
Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure; Domestic Abuse
Thema
marriage market
intrahousehold allocation
economies of scale
revealed preference
PSID

Ereignis
Geistige Schöpfung
(wer)
Cherchye, Laurens
De Rock, Bram
Surana, Khushboo
Vermeulen, Frederic
Ereignis
Veröffentlichung
(wer)
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
(wo)
Bonn
(wann)
2016

Handle
Letzte Aktualisierung
10.03.2025, 11:42 MEZ

Datenpartner

Dieses Objekt wird bereitgestellt von:
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. Bei Fragen zum Objekt wenden Sie sich bitte an den Datenpartner.

Objekttyp

  • Arbeitspapier

Beteiligte

  • Cherchye, Laurens
  • De Rock, Bram
  • Surana, Khushboo
  • Vermeulen, Frederic
  • Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Entstanden

  • 2016

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