Estimating intra-household sharing from time-use data

Estimating intra-household sharing is crucial to understanding overall inequality. However, expenditure data is almost always at the household level. A growing literature structurally estimates sharing from individual-level demand data for a single private good, the ‘assignable good’. I develop a new approach which is both grounded in a general collective household model, and simple to implement with widely available data. I also propose a novel assignable good: private leisure. I apply my methodology to UK working couples. My estimated sharing rule is consistent with bargaining theory, and I find that the poverty rate is 20.59% higher for women than men.