Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring) 1994

Nicol, Christopher J., and Alice Nakamura. 1994. "Labor Supply and Child Status Effects on Household Demands,
Journal of Human Resources 29(2):588-599.

This study draws attention to empirical evidence for the United Kingdom and Canada rejecting the separability of household commodity demands from labor supply. As might be anticipated on the basis of these rejections, using Canadian data, we find clear patterns in the average expenditure shares for husband-wife families classified by whether both spouses, only the man, only the woman, or neither worked. The patterns remain even when the families are further categorized by child-status and by family income. A number of implications of these findings are considered.

Christopher Nicol is an associate professor in the Economics Department at the University of Regina. Alice Nakamura is a professor in the Faculty of Business at the University of Alberta. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the December 1991 Donner Foundation Conference on the Economic Well-Being of Women and Children held at the University of Minnesota Industrial Relations Center. The results in this paper are based on the 1982, 1984, and 9186 public-use tapes for the Canadian Family Expenditure Surveys. The use and interpretations of these data are solely the responsibility of the authors. Nicol's research was supported in part by research grants from the Edmonton Social Planning Council as part of a larger project funded by health and Welfare Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the University of Regina President's Research Fund. Nakamura's research was supported in part by a Strategic Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors are grateful to martin Browning for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. They take responsibility for any remaining errors. The data used in this paper are available from August 1994 to August 1997 from Christopher Nicol, Department of Economics, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada S45 0A2.