Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/44168 
Year of Publication: 
2010
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 5113
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We propose a model of how parents resolve conflicts about sharing the negative short and long-term consequences from parenthood-related career interruptions on earnings. We introduce childcare sharing in a collective model of household behavior with public consumption as in Blundell, Chiappori, and Meghier (2005). Conceptually, the solution to the household problem can be thought of as a two-stage process: Parents first agree on public expenditures on professional childcare; then, conditional on the level of public consumption and the budget constraint stemming from stage one, parents determine their individual job absence durations and private consumption shares. Using relative income measures from German parental benefit data as distribution factors, we find evidence for Pareto efficiency in childcare sharing. More precisely, households with higher total incomes purchase more professional childcare, and changes in distribution factors shift the conditional parental leave allocation in favor of the partner whose relative income increased.
Subjects: 
childcare
collective model
conditional sharing rule
intra-household allocation
JEL: 
D13
J12
J13
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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