Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/147928 
Year of Publication: 
2016
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 10242
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We propose a novel structural method to empirically identify economies of scale in household consumption. We assume collective households with consumption technologies that define the public and private nature of expenditures through Barten scales. Our method recovers the technology by solely exploiting preference information revealed by households' consumption behavior. The method imposes no parametric structure on household decision processes, accounts for unobserved preference heterogeneity across individuals in different households, and requires only a single consumption observation per household. Our main identifying assumption is that the observed marital matchings are stable. We apply our method to data drawn from the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), for which we assume that similar households (in terms of observed characteristics like age or region of residence) operate on the same marriage market and are characterized by a homogeneous consumption technology. This application shows that our method yields informative results on the nature of scale economies and intrahousehold allocation patterns. In addition, it allows us to define individual compensation schemes required to preserve the same consumption level in case of marriage dissolution or spousal death.
Subjects: 
marriage market
intrahousehold allocation
economies of scale
revealed preference
PSID
JEL: 
D11
D12
D13
J12
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
272.68 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.