Wives’ Labor Supply and Taxation: a Conditional Preferences Approach

In the context of the unitary model of household labour supply we test whether the husband’s work is separable from consumption and the wife’s work. We apply a conditional preferences approach to derive a conditional labor supply function for the wife consistent with a unitary model with nonseparable preferences. Our main results are that consumption and wife’s work hours are not separable from the husband’s labour supply. Furthermore we find that the wife’s and husband’s work hours are complements when men tend to work longer hours than a typical full-time contract.