A collective model of leisure demand, generalised to the production of a household public good, is estimated on the British Household Panel Survey. The sharing rule is identified by using an original parametric framework based on the change of family status: from single-living to couple or from couple to single-living. Womens' ratios of private household expenditures are 40% on average. The level of intra-household inequality appears highly dependent on the intra-household wage gap. Omitting household production in the model would overestimate the ratio by 7 percentage points on average. Copyright 2007 The Author(s). Journal compilation Royal Economic Society 2007.

ABSTRACT:In this paper we present results from an economic experiment with 100 co-habiting couples, to investigate behaviour in a prisoner's dilemma played by spouses. We compare defection behaviour within real couples to pairs of strangers. We observe that one out of four participants choose not to cooperate with their spouse. To understand why spouses might prefer defection, we use a novel allocation task to elicit the individual's trade-off between efficiency and equality within a couple. We further investigate the impact of socio-demographic and psychological characteristics of the couples. We find in particular that lack of preferences for joint income maximization; having children and being married lead to higher defection rates in the social dilemma.

Female specialization on household work and male specialization on labor-market work is a widely observed phenomenon across time and countries. This absence of gender neutrality with respect to workdivision is known as the "work-division puzzle". Gender differences regarding characteristics (preferences, productivity) and context (wage rates, social norms) are generally recognized as competing explanations for this fact. We experimentally control for context and productivity to investigate preferences for work-division by true co-habiting couples, in a newly developed specialization task. Efficiency in this task comes at the cost of inequality, giving higher earnings to the "advantaged" player. We compare behavior when men (or women) are in the advantaged position, which corresponds to the traditional (or power) couple case where he (or she) earns more. We show that women do not contribute more than men to the household public good whatever the situation. This result allows us to rule out some of the standard explanations of the work-division puzzle.