Collective choice and children.

The collective model has become increasingly popular in the microeconomics literature. In the collective approach, household members, who have their own preferences, are involved in a bargaining process that takes place inside the household and that results in Pareto-efficient intra-household allocations. Thanks to its particular starting point of individual preferences, along with its better empirical performance, the collective model has become the most popular alternative to the standard unitary model that assumes that households behave as single decision makers. This research proposal aims at broadening the playing field of the collective approach. In particular, it will focus on the modeling of participation decisions and fertility choices in a context that accounts of household production. The specific nature of the interaction between (the number of) children and (especially female) labor supply begs for a dynamic model, which explicitly takes into account that past parental choices have an impact on future outcomes and decisions.

Keywords:Time use, Collective model, Labor supply, Consumption, Fertility, Microeconometrics, Dynamic programming, Microeconomics

Disciplines:Applied economics, Economic history, Macroeconomics and monetary economics, Microeconomics, Tourism