We analyze mobility in urban Mexico between three labor market states: working in the formal sector, working in the informal sector, and not working. We use a dynamic multinomial logit panel data model with random effects, explaining the labor market state of each individual during each time period. The data is drawn from Mexico’s Urban Employment Survey, a quarterly household survey for urban ...

We estimate the importance of household liquidity for the effect of the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) on vehicle transactions. We measure the average program impact by comparing households with “clunkers” eligible for CARS to households with similar vehicles that are ineligible. The liquidity provided by CARS contributed to its larger than anticipated take-up. Clunkers with existing loans,...

Observable and Unobservable Household Sharing Rules: Evidence from Young Couples' Pocket Money The leading evidence against the unitary household models is that "who gets what" is significantly dependent upon "who earns how much." However, it is difficult to pin down the causal effect of relative earnings on intra-household resource allocation because households jointly decide both labor supply...

Household Access to Microcredit and Child Work in Rural Malawi This paper examines the effect of household access to microcredit upon work by seven to eleven year old children in rural Malawi. Given that microcredit organizations foster household enterprises wherein much child labor is engaged, this paper aims to discover whether access to microcredit might increase work by children. It is foun...

The “collective approach” to household behaviour relaxes the restrictive features of the unitary model by specifying household welfare to be a weighted combination of the individuals’ utilities. However, the weights are assumed fixed or exogenous to the analysis. This paper extends the collective approach by proposing and estimating a framework where the weights are determined and simultaneousl...

This paper deals with the measurement of per capita household consumption expenditures when the household's underlying demographic structure changes during the survey period. To do this, we provide a formal definition of precisely what it means to mis-measure the household's demographic structure. We then use assumptions on demographic processes within the household during the survey period to ...

Building the Family Nest: Pre-Marital Investments, Marriage Markets and Spousal Allocations We develop a model of the household in which spousal incomes are determined by premarital investments, the marriage market is characterized by assortative matching, and endogenously-determined sharing rules form the basis of intra-household allocations. By incorporating pre-marital investments and spousa...

Individual and household based aggregate measures of joblessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance if work is unequally distributed. This paper introduces a simple set of indices that can be used to measure the extent of divergence between individual and household-based jobless measures. The indices, built around a comparison of the actual household jobless ...

Australia’s household sector appears to hold a greater proportion of its wealth in dwellings than do households in other countries. Average dwelling prices in Australia also appear to be high relative to household income, but dwellings in Australia are not noticeably higher in quality than those in comparable countries. This concentration of wealth in housing also does not seem attributable to ...

Causes and Consequences of a Father’s Child Leave: Evidence from a Reform of Leave Schemes Many OECD countries have implemented policies to induce couples to share parental leave. This paper investigates how responsive intra-household leave-sharing is to changes in economic incentives. To investigate this fundamental question, we are forced to look at one of the Nordic countries which are the m...