Stable Marriage, Children, and Intrahousehold Allocations

TL;DR

This paper develops a revealed preference framework to analyze resource sharing within households with children, considering custody arrangements, and demonstrates its application using data from the Netherlands and Russia.

Contribution

It introduces a novel revealed preference model for intrahousehold resource allocation accounting for custody types, enabling empirical identification of sharing patterns.

Findings

Successfully applied to Dutch and Russian household data

Identified intrahousehold resource allocation patterns

Provided testable conditions for sharing in households

Abstract

We present a revealed preference framework to study sharing of resources in households with children. We explicitly model the impact of the presence of children in the context of stable marriage markets under both potential types of custody arrangement - joint custody and sole custody. Our models deliver testable revealed preference conditions and allow for the identification of intrahousehold allocation of resources. Empirical applications to household data from the Netherlands (joint custody) and Russia (sole custody) show the methods' potential to identify intrahousehold allocation.