Collective Household Research Articles

Trade liberalization and gender inequality: role of social norms

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of trade liberalization on gender earning differentials and female labour force participation by considering the interaction between changes in relative wages, intra-household bargaining power and social norms.Design/methodology/approachA three-sector general equilibrium model is developed where female labour supply is determined as a collective household decision and depends on male and female wages and intra-household power distribution. On the other hand, the effect of power distribution on female labour supply depends on social norms.FindingsComparative static analysis shows that a tariff cut may reduce female labour force participation and widen gender earning inequality if (i) the agricultural sector is more male labour-intensive than the informal sector, and the marginal utility of the woman from household work is higher than that of the man or (ii) the agricultural sector is more female labour-intensive than the informal sector, and the marginal utility of the woman’s household work is higher to the man than the woman. Policies to raise the empowerment of women might lead to favourable labour market outcomes for women if the marginal utility of the woman’s household work is higher to the man than the woman irrespective of the factor intensity condition.Research limitations/implicationsThe results signify that the effect of trade liberalization hinges on both factor intensity conditions and the relative work preferences of women vis-à-vis men, which in turn is shaped by social norms.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the scant theoretical literature on labour market consequences of trade liberalization by considering the gender equality implications of trade liberalization from a supply side perspective. The results of the model are used to explain the recent gendered labour market consequences in India in the aftermath of trade liberalization.

Collective household welfare and intra-household inequality

We investigate the relationship between the individual and household indirect utility functions in the context of a collective household model. Our analysis produces new results that explain how the rule governing the distribution of resources among household members is related to the measurement of household welfare and intra-household inequality. We show that in a collective model of private consumption, income shares are equal to the product of two weights: the Pareto weight and a distribution weight reflecting income effects across individuals. For a weighted Bergsonian representation of household utility and general assumptions about individual preferences, we derive the associated household welfare functions and intra-household inequality measures belonging to a family of entropy indexes. We illustrate our findings with an empirical application that estimates a collective demand system to recover associated individual and household welfare functions along with the measures of intra-household inequality. This is the first application that estimates the Pareto weight and examines its role within a measure of income dispersion among household members.

Wages and Family Time Allocation

This paper examines changes in married people's allocation of time since 1980, a period in which female labor supply increased substantially, men's share of household work rose, and the gender wage gap narrowed down. I develop a life-cycle collective household model for market and non-market work, consumption and asset accumulation, which also features lack of commitment to lifetime marriage. Wages in the model shift intra-family bargaining power and induce bargaining effects on outcomes in addition to standard income and substitution effects. I estimate gender-specific preferences and how intra-family bargaining power changes with a narrowing gender gap using data from the PSID. The results suggest that a narrowing gender gap improved women's bargaining power in the family resulting in a shift of household work to their husbands. It also contributed to the increase in female labor market participation. If the gender gap is counterfactually eliminated, the proportion of women in full-time work rises throughout the lifecycle to match approximately that of men. The increase comes from women who cut down household chores and enter the labor market when they previously did not participate.

The effect of community socioeconomic status on sepsis-attributable mortality

PurposeCommunity factors may play a role in determining individual risk for sepsis, as well as sepsis-related morbidity and mortality. We sought to define the relationship between community socioeconomic status and mortality due to sepsis in an urban locale. MethodsUsing community statistical areas of Baltimore City, we dichotomized neighborhoods at median household income, and compared distribution of outcomes of interest within the two income categories. We performed multivariable regression analyses to determine the relationship between socioeconomic variables and sepsis-attributable mortality. ResultsThe collective median household income was $38,660 (IQR $32,530, 54,480), family poverty rate was 28.4% (IQR 13.5, 38.8%), and rate of death from sepsis was 3.1 per 10,000 persons (IQR 2.60, 4.10). Lower household income communities demonstrated higher rates of death from sepsis (3.65 (IQR 2.78, 4.40)) than higher household income communities (2.80 (IQR 2.05, 3.55)) (p = .02). In regression models, household income (β = −8.42, p = .006) and percentage of poverty in communities (β = 2.71, p = .01) demonstrated associations with sepsis-attributable mortality. DiscussionOur findings suggest that socioeconomic variables play significant role in sepsis-attributable mortality. Such confirmation of regional disparities in mortality due to sepsis warrants further consideration, as well as integration, for future national sepsis policies.

A National Governance Perspective on the Transformation of Rural Property Rights: The Chinese Experience

Property rights have multiple attributes, and these are correlated with national governance. In the West, property rights have the economic function of maximizing efficiency and the political function of rights protection, but in China, they also have a strong social character. With the modernization of national governance, these functions interact with and transform each other. When the state’s ability to supply public goods is relatively weak, property rights take on more of a social character, meeting public demand for welfare at the grassroots level. When the state is better able to provide public goods, the social function of property rights lessens as their economic function grows. The social character of property rights was the institutional foundation for China, as a huge agrarian state, to realize “governance through inaction,” and at the same time was the secret key that could break the code to the millennial continuity of Chinese agrarian civilization. Reforms including the collectivization of rural property rights after 1949, the “separation of two rights” (to collective ownership and household contracted land, with a focus on the latter), and the “separation of three rights,” (to collective ownership, household contracts and revitalized land management). These changes constitute a process in which the economic function of property rights has been growing while their social character has lessened under conditions of national governance modernization.

Consumption Inequality Among Children: Evidence From Child Fostering in Malawi

The share of household resources devoted to different children may depend on each child’s gender, birth order, age, or relationship to their caretaker. However, it is challenging to determine whether parents favor certain types of children as consumption data is typically collected at the household level and goods are shared among family members. Recent work has inferred children’s consumption by inverting household-level Engel curves for child-specific goods; but these studies are unable to identify inequality among children in the same household. I develop a new methodology using the collective household framework to identify consumption inequality between different types of children. I apply this method to child fostering in Malawi, where many children live in households away from both of their biological parents. I find little evidence of inequality between foster and non-foster children, with the exception of orphaned foster children whose consumption is 23 percent less than non-orphaned foster children.

Collective forest tenure reform and household energy consumption: A case study in Yunnan Province, China

The recent Collective Forest Tenure Reform in China has started the process of devolving forest management rights from village collectives to households since 2003. In this paper, we study the impact of the reform on rural energy consumption. Devolving forest tenure improves farmers' access to forest products on their newly acquired forestland, and is therefore expected to increase farmers' fuelwood consumption. The reform also allows farmers to adopt some revenue-enhancing forest technologies which may lead to energy switching in farmer households. Our empirical study finds that the devolution significantly increases household fuelwood consumption for both lower and higher income households; the lower income households benefit more. This is welfare-improving in places where alternative fuels are still too costly. We find limited evidence that higher income households in Yunnan begin to substitute alternative commercial fuels for fuelwood when those are available. Our findings suggest further devolution of forest rights, especially in the poor, forest-rich regions.

Household Portfolio Choice and Retirement

This study examines household portfolio choice through the retirement transition. I show that couples significantly decrease their stock allocations after retirement, whereas singles’ allocations remain relatively unchanged. Reallocations are concentrated among couples in which the wife is more risk averse than her husband. Husbands’ and wives’ respective retirement events are followed by opposite-signed changes in stock allocations. These findings are consistent with a model of collective household decision making in which spouses have heterogeneous risk preferences, and suggest that dynamics in the distribution of intrahousehold bargaining power generate time-varying household risk aversion.

Allocation of Expenditures in Elderly Households and the Cost of Widowhood

SummaryWidowhood and retirement change the economie environment of elderly households. While retirement changes income and expenditure patterns, widowhood fundamentally changes the structure of the household. Besides high non-monetary cost of losing the partner, resources are no longer shared and economies of scale arising from joint consumption are lost. This paper applies a collective household model to expenditure data on elderly households in Switzerland. The findings suggest that 44% of household resources are assigned to wives and both spouses save roughly 27% or, on average, 800 Swiss Francs on monthly expenditures relative to living apart. Estimates of indifference scales indicate that men suffer a financial loss after losing their wife, while widowed women do not.

Changing the Rules Midway: The Impact of Granting Alimony Rights on Existing and Newly Formed Partnerships

The paper analyzes the effect of a reform granting alimony rights to cohabiting couples in Canada, exploiting the fact that each province extended these rights in different years and required different cohabitation length. A theoretical analysis, based on a collective household model with a matching framework, predicts that changes in alimony laws would affect existing couples and couples-to-be differently. For existing couples, legislative changes aimed at favoring (wo)men do benefit them, especially if the match quality is low. However, for couples not yet formed, they generate offsetting intra-household transfers (in our model, of leisure) and lower intra-marital allocations for the spouses who are the intended beneficiary. Our empirical analysis confirms these predictions. Among cohabiting couples united long enough before the reform, obtaining the right to petition for alimony led women to lower their labor force participation. These results, however, do not hold — and, in some cases, are reversed — for newly formed cohabiting couples.

Income Taxation in an Empirical Collective Household Labour Supply Model with Discrete Hours

Most empirical studies on the impact of labour income taxation on the labour supply behaviour of households use a unitary modelling approach. In this paper we empirically analyze income taxation and the choice of working hours by combining the collective approach for household behaviour and the discrete hours choice framework with fixed costs of work. We identify the sharing rule parameters with data on working hours of both the husband and the wife within a couple. Parameter estimates are used to evaluate various model outcomes, like the wage elasticities of labour supply and the impacts of wage changes on the income sharing between husband and wife. We also simulate the consequences of a policy change in the tax system. We find that the collective model has different empirical outcomes of income sharing than a restricted model that imposes pooling of men's earnings and the household's non-labour income in the female's budget constraint. These differences in outcomes have consequences for the evaluation of a policy change in the tax system.

액티브 에이징 지원형 공동주택 주호설계를 위한 예비 고령층 및 고령층 생활패턴과 선호주거공간특성 연구

This study explored demographic characteristics based everyday lifestyle patterns and preferred spatial requirements of potential collective housing residents in Korea who would pursue 'Ambient Assisted Living' with 'Aging In Place' initiatives. Online questionnaire survey was commissioned for the pre-elderly and elderly age groups of 40s, 50s and above 60s, 801 individuals in total. Survey participants were asked to select 3 most preferred answers among 5 with ranked priority to clearly capture each testee's true priority choices over 50 carefully designed questions in relation with promoting healthcare sensitive residential spaces. Comprehensive analysis was carried out by processing the survey results with cross-tabulation analysis. The outcome showed fairy unanimous preference patterns across majority of the questions regardless of gender, age, and economic status differences. Formation of separate and independent household, relatively spacious living room, possible layout alteration after moving into a residence, non-slippery bathroom floor, bio-medic sensor embedded chair or sofa were identified as those commonly preferred requirements of physical space design for an household. Some subject groups such as female and age group of over 60s show similar preference profile in the sense that both groups prefer living in the same collective residence when they are aged, cooking ordor ventilating kitchen, bed with storage below, ventilation for kitchen and bathroom. This implies certain demographic groups share their residential preference when aging is in progress. Differentiated residential preference profiles among different demographic groups were also identified. For instance, male, age groups of 50s and over 60s, low-income group prefer living in a same household whereas female, age group of 40s and high-income group turn out to prefer living in a separate household in the same collective housing complex when they are aged. While most of testees prefer garden farming for their apartment veranda, age group of 40s and high-income group express their preference of using veranda as a resting place. Comprehensive analysis on those preference profiles across major demographic classification was summarized in table format focused on healthcare sensitive household unit design. This study is a pioneering attempt to identify a set of preferred health-sensitive lifestyles and residential space requirements to be insightful for planning and designing 'active aging in place' supportive collective housing household units in Korean context.

Household risk aversion and portfolio choices

In practice, stock investment is one of the most important decisions made by households. The primary goal of this paper is to explain family investment decisions under the assumptions of household member’s preferences and efficient risk sharing based on the collective household model. In particular, by examining the absolute (relative) risk aversion of the household welfare function, we demonstrate how household’s portfolio allocation in stocks changes with family wealth. We examine two types of preference heterogeneity between family members: parameter heterogeneity and functional form heterogeneity. This study offers an alternative explanation of household portfolio choice corresponding with the observation that wealthier households tend to hold greater share of their wealth in risky assets. Specifically, if two decision-makers have standard constant relative risk aversion preference with different relative risk aversions in a household, family’s relative risk aversion decreases as household wealth increases (decreasing relative risk aversion).

Is consumption efficiency within households falsifiable?

The collective household model is based upon the assumption that decision makers have achieved efficient outcomes. This paradigm, which has become one of the leading approaches in family economics, is seldom, if ever, rejected, raising doubt about its falsifiability. We show that the standard approach to test the collective model may yield misleading inferences. We develop a new test procedure to assess its validity. Our approach extends to households that potentially include more than two decision makers. We provide an informal meta-analysis that suggests that much of the evidence in favor of collective rationality in the empirical literature appears to be inconsistent with our test. We illustrate the latter using data from a survey we have conducted in Burkina Faso. Consumption efficiency within monogamous households is not rejected using the standard testing procedure while it is clearly rejected using our proposed test procedure. Furthermore, our test also rejects consumption efficiency for bigamous households. We conclude that intra-household efficiency does yield empirically falsifiable restrictions despite being scarcely rejected in the literature.

The Collective Farm‐household Model: Policy and Welfare Simulations

AbstractThis study develops a household enterprise model extended to encompass recent advances in collective theory. We use a simulation model in which production and consumption‐leisure choices are represented along with the rule governing intra‐household resource allocation, to analyze the income and wage responses of each family member. The household is treated as an equilibrium model whose accounts are based on a collective household accounting matrix, with the social dimension being the wife/husband classes. The simulation analysis illustrates the policy relevance of the collective approach to household behavior for inferring the impact of economic policies on individual behavior and welfare. We also propose insightful comparisons with the unitary model to make the behavioral and welfare policy relevance of the collective approach evident.

A class of individual expenditure functions

This study examines the regularity properties ensuring that individual expenditure functions are legitimate individual cost functions in the context of collective household models. The structure of collective household models entails a scaling of income through a function that describes how resources are shared within the household. This modified income function defines expenditure functions at the individual level. Our study completes previous work on modifying functions by Barten, Gorman, and Lewbel that was limited to the investigation of the scaling of prices and the translation of income without considering the scaling of incomes. We find that the product of the modifying function and the household expenditure function maintains the regularity properties of expenditure functions if the modifying function is positive, homogeneous of degree zero and at least quasi-concave. We also examine how changes in prices affect the curvature of the modified income function and, in turn, inequality in the distribution of resources within the household. An example shows how our results can be used to test the curvature properties of individual expenditure functions as well as to measure the inequality within the household.

Intra-household bargaining over household technology adoption

We examine the barriers to adoption of improved cook stoves (ICSs) in rural India, using a large, nationally representative dataset. We develop a collective household model to derive testable hypotheses about whether women’s intra-household influence, together with their relatively strong marginal preference for ICSs, affects adoption. Using a joint adoption-influence econometric model, we find compelling evidence that women’s influence over intra-household decisions significantly increases adoption. We further distinguish between alternative sources of women’s influence, and argue that our distinction has potential implications for ICS dissemination policies. We find that while there is significant variation in women’s influence across rural India due to cultural and other sociological factors, the effect of intra-household influence on adoption has a significant bargaining power component. Our results suggest that ICS programs may be able to increase adoption by marketing stoves in ways that empower women.

Centenarians' Marital History and Living Arrangements: Pathways to Extreme Longevity.

Mortality risk for older persons is associated with marital status and living arrangements, for example, living alone, with a spouse, with others but without a spouse, or in a collective household. This study analyzed the marital history and living arrangements of centenarians with the aim of identifying which trajectories are associated with reaching an advanced age. Original longitudinal register-based data for 3,000 Belgian centenarians born between the years 1893 and 1903 were used to reconstruct their marital history and living arrangements during their later life (from age 60 to 100). The marital history and living arrangements for male and female centenarians were strikingly different after they reached the age of 60. From age 60 to 100, male centenarians lived twice as long with their wife as female centenarians did with their husband. Female centenarians lived alone for more than half of their lives. Male centenarians had younger wives and female centenarians had older husbands than non-centenarians. More than half of the widowers remarried and did so with a woman who was generally more than 10 years younger. Most centenarians ended their life in a nursing home but entered it very late in life. In very old age, living with a spouse is beneficial for men but not for women, for whom living alone is more advantageous than living with a spouse. This study compares the marital history and living arrangement trajectory of centenarians with people who did not live as long to determine associated mortality risks confirming that men are often not able to live by themselves, whereas women seem to have few problems to manage on their own.

Centralized and Decentralized Demand in Collective Household Models

We investigate the relationship between centralized and decentralized collective demand models applied to consumption within a household with multiple individuals. The centralized program is described by a Bergsonian representation of the household utility function and a household budget constraint, while the decentralized program is described by individual utility maximization subject to an income allocation among individual. The household income allocation among individuals involves an income sharing rule. We show that, in general, income shares are equal to the product of two weights: the Bergsonian weight and a weight reflecting income effects across individuals. We also show that the latter weights play a role in income sharing and in household welfare evaluation when individual preferences depart from quasi-homotheticity. We also examine how individual preferences affect the relationship between centralized and decentralized demand.

Gary Becker's a Theory of the Allocation of Time

Becker's (1965) paper, ‘A Theory of the Allocation of Time’ revolutionised the modelling of household behaviour, by unifying Marshallian demand functions for goods with labour supply and related time use decisions within the household. In this article, we first summarise Becker's time allocation model and associated key contributions, then we show how his original framework extends to modern collective household models.