There is some controversy in the field of household economics regarding the efficiency of household decisions. We make the point that a flexible specification of spousal preferences and the household production technology precludes the possibility of using revealed preference data on household...

The CFL programme has been introduced in 1985 to improve the youths occupational chances. It provides the employers some incentive to recruit young workers by reducing both the labour and the firing costs relative to those they would bear by recruiting older workers. Following the literature,...

The availability of a flexible labour force might influence adjustment decisions regarding the rigid part of the labour force. To test this idea, we contrast the use of trainees (fixed-term contracts) and normal-contract workers (open-end contracts) when a reform made it more costly to use...

We make the point that a flexible specification of spousal preferences and household production technology precludes the possibility of using revealed preference data on household time allocations to determine the manner in which spouses interact. Under strong, but standard, assumptions...

This paper investigates the role that idiosyncratic uncertainty plays in shaping social preferences over the degree of labor market flexibility, in a general equilibrium model of dynamic labor demand where the productivity of firms evolves over time as a Geometric Brownian motion. A key result...

Labor market reforms increasing flexibility at the margin have been recently paying out in terms of employment growth. This paper argues that two-tier labor market reforms have a transitional honeymoon, job creating effect. In a dynamic model of labor demand under uncertainty, the paper predicts...

We formulate a model of household behavior in which cooperation is costly and in which these costs vary across households. Some households rationally decide to behave noncooperatively, which in our context is an efficient outcome. An intriguing feature of the model is that, while the welfare of...

Most econometric models of intrahousehold behavior assume that household decisionmaking is efficient, i.e., utility realizations lie on the Pareto frontier. In this paper we investigate this claim by adding a number of participation constraints to the household allocation problem. Short-run...