Anyck Dauphin, Bernard Fortin et Guy Lacroix vont publier un article dans la revue Review of Economics of the Household

6 janvier 2017

Anyck Dauphin, Bernard Fortin et Guy Lacroix vont publier un article dans la revue Review of Economics of the Household intitulé "Is Consumption Efficiency Within Households Falsifiable ?"

Résumé:  

The collective household model is based upon the assumption that decision-makers have achieved efficient outcomes. This paradigm, which has become one of the leading approaches in family economics, is seldom, if ever, rejected, raising doubt about its falsifiability. We show that the standard approach to test the collective model may yield misleading inferences. We develop a new test procedure to assess its validity. Our approach extends to households that potentially include more than two decision-makers. We provide an informal meta-analysis that suggests that much of the evidence in favour of collective rationality in the empirical literature appears to be inconsistent with our test. We illustrate the latter using data from a survey we have conducted in Burkina Faso. Consumption efficiency within monogamous households is not rejected using the standard testing procedure while it is clearly rejected using our proposed test procedure. Furthermore, our test also rejects consumption efficiency for bigamous households. We conclude that intra-household efficiency does yield empirically falsifiable restrictions despite being scarcely rejected in the literature.