Children may be viewed as public goods whereby both parents receive equal genetic benefits yet one parent often invests more heavily than the other. We introduce a microeconomic framework for understanding household investment decisions to address questions concerning conflicts of interest over types and amount of work effort among married men and women. Although gains and costs of marriage may...

This study examines the moderational role played by the feeling of mattering to the partner in the relationship between gender ideology and perceived fairness using a sample of 141 Canadian mothers with at least one child between the ages of two to five years old. Results support the moderator model and suggest that the emotional rewards mothers receive from their romantic partner influence the...

Married women often undertake a larger share of housework in many countries and yet they do not always perceive the inequitable division of household labor to be "unfair." Several theories have been proposed to explain the pervasive perception of fairness that is incongruent with the observed inequity in household tasks. These theories include 1) economic resource theory, 2) time constraint the...

This paper we examine intra-household gender differences and the incidence of child labor and children’s school attendance in Brazil to test whether the unitary model of household allocations is suitable in the child labor context. We begin by building an intra-household allocation model where fathers and mothers may affect the education investment and the child labor participation of their son...

Income Pooling and Household Division of Labor: Evidence from Danish Couples If income pooling indicates primary earners’ willingness to trade part of their income with spouses who earn less and work more in household production, then among specialized couples income pooling will be positively associated with the price of commercial domestic services, substitutes for household production. In li...