This paper criticizes the view that discrimination limits the disadvantaged sex to undertaking housework and thus ensures that gains from specialization at the household level are not wasted. Our framework gives attention to causal links between labor market discrimination and the strategic behavior of women and men within families. We consider a repeated family bargaining model that links the ...

The division of labor is an important component of the organization of human society. However, why this division evolved in hominids requires further investigation. Archeological evidence suggests that it appeared after the emergence of Homo sapiens and contributed to the great success of our species. We develop a mathematical model to investigate under what conditions division of labor should ...

Gender disparities in labor markets have important economic implications in sub-Saharan Africa. At least three different aspects of poverty and income gen­ eration can be related to the decisions made by various household members in terms of their allocation of time and their prospects for labor income. First, traditional consumption-based poverty is directly related to the earnings of househol...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on families' lives, with parents all over the world struggling to meet increased demands of housework, childcare and home-schooling. Much additional burden been shouldered by women, particularly in countries traditionally uneven division household labor. Yet increase remote work from home since also potential paternal involvement family life thus ...

In this paper we propose a mathematical model for studying the phenomenon of division of labor in ant colonies. Inside this model we investigate how simple task allocation mechanisms can be used to achieve an optimal division of labor. We believe the proposed model captures the essential biological features of division of labor in ant colonies and is general enough to study a variety of differe...

In the present paper, we adopt the usual assumptions of the collective approach, i.e., individualism and efficiency, to study household labor supply. The theoretical innovation is twofold. Firstly, we incorporate in the initial setting the decision to participate to the labor market. Secondly, we abandon the assumption of linearity of the budget constraint. We show that (i) structural elements ...

In [1], households are assumed to supply labor inelastically in each time period t, so there is no labor/leisure “choice”; the only argument of the household utility function at each time point t is amounts of a single produced consumption good (or a scalar index for “real” consumption). In contrast, in [2] the household utility function has two arguments in each time period t: (i) (produced) g...