Estimating Intrahousehold Allocation in a Collective Model With Household Production

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the intra-family distribution of income and the individual demand for leisure and household production from Swedish cross-sectional household data. As a basis for the analysis, we use a collective model where each individual is characterized by his or her own utility function and divides total time between leisure, household production and market work. For the purpose of comparison, we also estimate a more traditional model of labor supply, the unitary model. It is found that the unitary model can be rejected against the more general collective model, while the income pooling hypothesis cannot be rejected.