Until recently, much of the labour supply literature has been predicated on the assumption that all individuals are free to choose the amount of labour that they supply at the prevailing wage rate. However, empirical studies have shown that many individuals are rationed to work more or fewer hours than they desire.
In this thesis we formulate and estimate two models of household labour supply behaviour which take account of the fact that constraints in the labour, market prevent some (male) household heads from supplying their desired amount of labour. In the first model we consider the case where a male is constrained in the number of hours of labour he can supply in a working week. In the second model we decompose male leisure into leisure during working weeks and leisure during non-working weeks, and consider rations on both. To be consistent with the economic theory of consumer behaviour we derive these models by assuming that households, based on their preferences, perform an optimization procedure to determine their desired quantities of male leisure (provided it is not rationed), female leisure and goods consumption.
Since we model household behaviour, by jointly estimating demand equations for rationed and non-rationed households we are able to examine the effects that rationing of the labour supply of the household head has on the labour supply of his spouse and on household goods consumption. We find that there is no general pattern to the way in which the marginal budget shares and labour supply elasticities differ among rationed and
non-rationed households. Further, the relationship between the rationed and non-rationed marginal budget shares and elasticities differs according to the demographic characteristics of the household.
We also find that our estimates differ from those obtained when rationed households are either ignored or omitted from the sample. In view of this result, and the fact that marginal budget shares and labour supply elasticities for rationed households cannot be calculated using the misspecified models, we conclude that it is important to use the entire sample of rationed and non-rationed households to estimate the model in which each type of rationing is modelled appropriately. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/24353 |
| Date | January 1983 |
| Creators | Ryan, David Leslie |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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