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Collective labor supply with many consumption goods

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Abstract

We extend Chiappori’s (J Polit Econ 100:437–467, 1992) standard, ’collective’ model of labor supply to the case of several consumption goods. We show that more robust estimates obtain. Moreover, individual demands for each commodity, although unobservable, can be recovered up to an additive constant. In particular, the impact of changes in wages, non labor income or distribution factors on individual consumption patterns can be identified even though no individual consumption is observed.

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Notes

  1. See also Grossbard-Shechtman (2003).

  2. See Chiappori and Ekeland (2009) for a precise discussion.

  3. See also Grossbard-Shechtman and Neideffer (1997) and Grossbard and Amuedo-Dorantes (2007).

  4. See also Galasso (1999) for a similar investigation.

  5. The case of public consumptions is considered in a companion paper, Chiappori and Ekeland 2009, and a revealed preferences perspective is provided by Cherchye, De Rock and Vermeulen (2010).

  6. It is interesting to note that the vast majority of empirical papers devoted to household labor supply actually use a private good version of the model; in that sense, this paper is in line with a common practice in the literature. Note, however, that the results derived below could be extended to the case in which public goods are present, through the notion of conditional sharing rule(see for instance Chiappori and Ekeland 2009).

  7. Among earlier contributions, one can mention Fortin and Lacroix (1997), Dauphin and Fortin (2001), Vermeulen (2005), Dauphin (2003), Donni (2003, 2007, 2009), Couprie (2004), Bargain et al. (2006), Blundell et al. (2007) among many others.

  8. In what follows, we shall assume for simplicity that only one distribution factor is available; if not, the argument is similar but additional, proportionality conditions must be introduced.

  9. In particular, this conclusion generalizes the results derived by Browning et al. (1994) under the assumption of fully constrained labor supply.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Columbia University, Columbia, NY, USA

    P. A. Chiappori

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  1. P. A. Chiappori
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Correspondence to P. A. Chiappori.

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I am indebted to the editor and two anonymous referess for useful comments. Errors are mine.

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Chiappori, P.A. Collective labor supply with many consumption goods. Rev Econ Household 9, 207–220 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-010-9107-0

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