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Project

Essays on family economics

What happens within households has relevant consequences for individual welfare and, usually, is not considered in aggregate measures of income inequality, poverty, and multidimensional welfare across households. My thesis would aim to develop a toolkit that will allow researchers to struc- turally identify the intrahousehold interaction structure between household members and to link this information (e.g., member-specific welfare indices) with the measurement of aggregate measures of inequality, poverty, and wellbeing. The structural identification of the intrahousehold decision structure will account for marital matching patterns in the marriage market, allowing the researcher to identify the trade-off between material and immaterial gains of being married. Moreover, instead of proposing a fully parametric or nonparamet- ric methodology to analyze consumption and matching behavior, I plan to develop a semiparametric framework. In this way, and combining the best of both worlds, the methodology would be based on a revealed preference identification of the intrahousehold decision structure that is complemented by a prior estimation of household demand functions. Finally, to link the individual information with aggregate measures of welfare across households, I plan to use a decomposition of inequality, poverty, and multidimensional welfare indices. This, in turn, will allow the researcher to pin down the within and between households components of aggregate measures.

Date:22 Nov 2021 →  Today
Keywords:Family economics
Disciplines:Labour and demographic economics, Consumption, saving, production, investment, labour markets and informal economy
Project type:PhD project