Program > Papers by speaker > Surana Khushboo

Stable Marriage and Children: Child Custody and Intrahousehold Sharing
Khushboo Surana  1@  , Mikhail Freer  2, *@  
1 : Catholic University of Leuven  (KU Leuven)
Oude Markt 13 - bus 5005, 3000 Leuven -  Belgium
2 : Université Libre de Bruxelles [Bruxelles]  (ULB)
Avenue Franklin Roosevelt 50 - 1050 Bruxelles -  Belgium
* : Corresponding author

We present a revealed preference framework to study sharing of resources in households with children. Children's consumption is often treated as a public good in the household. However, it is different from other public goods (like housing or transportation) in a sense that it may not be internalized by a new partner (in case of remarriage). Moreover, the "technology" used to produce children's consumption after divorce is determined by the custody legislation in place. We explicitly model the impact of presence of children in the context of stable marriage markets under three types of custody arrangement (no legislation, single person custody and joint custody). The models deliver testable revealed preference conditions and allow for the identification of intrahousehold allocation of resources. An empirical application of these conditions to a survey data of US households shows that children and related custody laws are important factors affecting intrahousehold sharing. Incorporating these factors support many empirical findings that couples with children are more stable than couples without children. In addition, ignoring these factors leads to biased intrahousehold allocations. Specically, our analysis shows that taking these factors into account increases the recovered women's share, on average, by 7%.


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