Intra Household Allocation of Consumption: A Model and some Evidence from French Data

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we reproduce upon French data previous tests of the so-called "income pooling" hypothesis, a consequence of traditional models of household behaviour according to which only total income -- and not income distribution across members -- should matter. We find that income pooling is rejected: for a given level of total income, the share of husband's and wife's own income significantly affects the structure of consumption. Our second purpose is more innovative. We construct a theoretical model of collective decision making, based upon the efficiency assumption of collective decision making. Both our setting and the traditional, household preference model can be nested within a family of functional forms. The collective model generates specific restrictions upon the parameters that can the tested. Those restrictions turn out not to be rejected by the data.