Do husbands and wives pool their resources? Evidence from the United Kingdom child benefit.

Common preference models of family behavior imply income pooling, a restriction on family demand functions such that only the sum of husband's income and wife's income affects the allocation of goods and time. Testing the pooling hypothesis is difficult because most family income sources are not ex...

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Published in:Journal of Human Resources Vol. 32; pp. 463 - 481
Main Authors: Lundberg, Shelly J., Pollak, Robert A., Wales, Terence J.
Format: Article
Published: University of Wisconsin Press Summer97
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        atl: Do husbands and wives pool their resources? Evidence from the United Kingdom child benefit.
      aug:
        au:
          Lundberg, Shelly J.
          Pollak, Robert A.
          Wales, Terence J.
      su:
        Resource allocation
        Families & economics
        Clothing & dress
        Married people
        Economics
        Consumption (Economics)
        Income
        Child welfare
        United Kingdom
      sug:
        subj:
          United Kingdom
          Resource allocation
          Families & economics
          Clothing & dress
          Married people
          Economics
          Consumption (Economics)
          Income
          Child welfare
      ab: Common preference models of family behavior imply income pooling, a restriction on family demand functions such that only the sum of husband's income and wife's income affects the allocation of goods and time. Testing the pooling hypothesis is difficult because most family income sources are not exogenous to the allocations being analyzed. In this paper, we present an alternative test based on a “natural experiment”—a policy change in the United Kingdom that transferred a substantial child allowance to wives in the late 1970s. Using Family Expenditure Survey data, we find strong evidence that a shift toward greater expenditures on women's clothing and children's clothing relative to men's clothing coincided with this income redistribution. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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