To read this content please select one of the options below:

Time Use, Intrahousehold Inequality, and Individual Welfare: Revealed Preference Analysis

Ruben Bostyn ^a

Laurens Cherchye ^a

Bram De Rock ^b

Frederic Vermeulen ^a

^aUniversity of Leuven, Belgium

^bUniversité libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Time Use in Economics

ISBN: 978-1-83753-605-4, eISBN: 978-1-83753-604-7

Publication date: 14 December 2023

Abstract

We make use of rich microdata from the Belgian MEqIn survey, which contains detailed information on individual consumption, public consumption inside households, and time use. We explain the observed household behavior by means of a collective model that integrates marriage market restrictions on intrahousehold allocation patterns. We adopt a revealed preference approach that abstains from any functional form assumptions on individual utility functions or intrahousehold decision processes. This allows us to (set) identify the sharing rule, which governs the intrahousehold sharing of time and money, and to quantify economies of scale within households. We use these results to conduct a robust individual welfare and inequality analysis, hereby highlighting the important role of detailed consumption and time use data.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

We thank the Editor and two anonymous referees for their insightful comments, which substantially improved our chapter. We are further grateful to the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (FWO) and the Research Fund KU Leuven for financial support.

Citation

Bostyn, R., Cherchye, L., De Rock, B. and Vermeulen, F. (2023), "Time Use, Intrahousehold Inequality, and Individual Welfare: Revealed Preference Analysis", Hamermesh, D.S. and Polachek, S.W. (Ed.) Time Use in Economics (Research in Labor Economics, Vol. 51), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 161-186. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0147-912120230000051007

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited