This study provides evidence on optimal commodity tax rates in Australia, and on their sensitivity to demand function and demographic specification. The optimal tax algorithm, proposed and used here, allows the social welfare weights to depend on prices, household composition and aggregate...

This paper tests, using data from South Africa and Pakistan, two major implications of the unitary household model, namely, that (a) each individual pools the various components of her/his non labour earnings, and (b) men and women pool their non labour earnings between themselves. The study...

The unitary household model implies pooling of all individual incomes. This study distinguishes between various types of income pooling and tests them on Australian household income/expenditure data. The tests recognise the endogeneity of both earned and unearned income and are performed using a...

Cross country poverty comparisons on unit records have rarely, involved bothy developing and developed countries. The present study attempts to fill this gap by comparing poverty across fourteen nations with diverse economic and demograhpic characteristics and at vastly different stages of...

Notwithstanding serious conceptual problem in its measurement, the equivalence scale is a parameter with considerable policy importance in view of its use in welfare comparisons across households. This paper investigates the sensitivity of the estimated scale to models and commodities.

This paper uses data from Peru, Pakistan and Ghana to simultaneously analyse child labour and child schooling, and compares them between these countries. We use a multinomial logit estimation procedure that analyses the participation and non participation of children in schooling and in...