Gender and Say: A Model of Household Behaviour with Endogenously Determined Balance of Power

Abstract

The evidence that the same income can lead to different household decisions, depending on who the earner is, has led to an effort to replace the standard household model with the ‘collective model’, which recognizes that a household’s decisions depend on the power balance between the husband and the wife. This article recognizes that the power balance can, in turn, depend on the decisions made. A new ‘household equilibrium’ and its dynamics are described and it is shown that there can be multiple equilibria in female labour-supply, and that child labour can decline and rise as the wife’s power increases.