The main goal of this paper is to estimate the preferences of the Italian society towards equity in order to verify whether preferences i) have changed across the years, and ii) can be related to specific sociodemographic characteristics. Introducing equity concerns in the implementation of...

This paper describes the life-cycle alcohol consumption patterns of Italian households by decomposing gender, cohort, age and time effects and estimates the importance of demographic characteristics using a double hurdle model. The application is based on ISTAT households expenditure survey for...

This paper estimates the rule governing the intra-household resource allocation between the husband and the wife representing children’s interests using 1996 data for the African society of Djibouti. In the Horn of Africa the consumption of qat (a substance similar to amphetamine) is an...

Incorporating equity considerations in comparisons of economic policies is always challenging. This paper uses a social welfare function, a la Jorgenson and Slesnick, incorporating both e±ciency and equity to estimate society's preferences toward inequality. The function is based upon a...

This paper provides estimates of gender specific demand systems related to the demand for market goods, household products and leisure. The estimated sharing rule has been obtained using a structural form approach. The estimates illustrate how the household structure and working conditions...

This paper estimates the contribution of child labour to the formation of household income in rural enterprises. The contribution to household income from the employment of children comes either from the employment on-farm at a shadow wage or off-farm in the agricultural or other sectors. The...

The aim of this research is to investigate the relationship between obesity and wages, using data for nine countries from the European Com- munity Household Panel (ECHP) over the period 1998-2001. We improve upon the existing literature by adopting a Quantile Regression approach to characterize...

We study the joint impact of gender and marital status on financial decisions. First, we test the hypothesis that marriage represents - in a portfolio framework - a sort of safe asset, and that this effect is stronger for women. Controlling for a number of observable characteristics, we show...

We develop a simple model of household time allocation decisions under strong functional form assumptions regarding preferences and household production technology. We argue that the specification is general when allowing for unrestrictive forms of population heterogeneity in the parameters...

Conventional pension systems suffer from a design defect which makes them financially unsustainable, and a source of inefficiency for the economy as a whole. The paper outlines a second-best policy which includes a public pension system made up of two parallel schemes, a Bismarckian one allowing...