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Objective. To examine the effect of changes in parent-child coresidence on caregiving decisions of non-resident siblings over a 5-year period while controlling for characteristics of the elderly parent and adult children in the family network. Method. We use difference-in-difference models applied to Health and Retirement Study-Assets and Health Dynamics of the Elderly data to test the hypothesis that the formation of a joint household between a parent and one of her children raises the bargaining power of non-resident siblings, who then reduce their care to the parent. Similarly, the dissolution of a parent-child household is expected to increase the bargaining power of the child who no longer coresides with the parent relative to her siblings. Results. We find that children whose parent and sibling begin coresiding during the study period are less likely to provide care and provide fewer hours of care than children whose parents never coresided with a child. Adult children whose parent cease coresiding with a sibling, on the other hand, have a higher likelihood of providing care and provide significantly more hours of care relative to children whose parents either coresided with a sibling in both time periods or never coresided with a child. Discussion. Meeting the needs of the growing elderly population while maintaining them in the community is a particular focus of long-term care policy. To the extent that shared living is an important component of such care, the observed sensitivity of nonresident children's caregiving efforts has implications for the well-being of both disabled parents and their coresiding adult children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does joint taxation disadvantage women? To answer that question, this article begins by reviewing bargaining models of intrafamily allocation and discussing the determinants of ‘bargaining power’. It argues that wage rates rather than earnings are determinants of bargaining power, and that productivity in household production is also a determinant of bargaining power. In the absence of human capital effects, joint taxation does not appear to disadvantage women in bargaining. Hence, the claim that joint taxation disadvantages women, if correct, depends on effects that operate through incentives to accumulate human capital. But a satisfactory analysis of the effects of taxation on human capital awaits the further development of dynamic models of family bargaining. (JEL codes: H21, H24, D13, J22) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of parental marital status, marital history, and family type on intergenerational living arrangements and adult children's time and cash transfers to their unpartnered disabled elderly parents. Methods. We used data from the Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old survey to estimate the joint probabilities that an adult child provides time and/or cash transfers to a parent and to analyze a five-level categorical variable capturing parent-child living arrangements. Results. The estimates suggest significant detrimental effects of parental divorce and step relationship on time transfers and on the probability of coresidence with the index child. Family type, as captured by the composition of the index child's sibling network according to kin relationship to the parent, also affected transfers and living arrangement choices of adult children. Discussion. The findings that transfers from adult children to their unpartnered disabled elderly parents depend on parental marital status and kin relationship suggest that changing family patterns are altering the traditional role of the family as a support network. These findings raise concerns about the care likely to be available to future cohorts of elderly persons who will have experienced substantially higher rates of divorce, remarriage, and step parenthood than the cohort considered in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we use a two-stage bargaining model to analyze the living arrangement of a disabled elderly parent and the assistance provided to the parent by her adult children. The first stage determines the living arrangement: the parent can live in a nursing home, live alone in the community, or live with any child who has invited coresidence. The second stage determines the assistance provided by each child in the family. Working by backward induction, we first calculate the level of assistance that each child would provide to the parent in each possible living arrangement. Using these calculations, we then analyze the living arrangement that would emerge from the first stage game. A key assumption of our model is that family members cannot or will not make binding agreements at the first stage regarding transfers at the second stage. Because coresidence is likely to reduce the bargaining power of the coresident child relative to her siblings, coresidence may fail to emerge as the equilibrium living arrangement even when it is Pareto efficient. That is, the outcome of the two-stage game need not be Pareto efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows that a number of central results of social choice theory have analogues in the frameworks of single profile social preference ordering and single profile social preference relations. Bergson-Samuelson social welfare functions have generally been thought to be immune to the type of analysis to which arrow social welfare functions are subjected in the theory of social choice. The Bergson-Samuelson problem is usually described as one of constructing a social utility function corresponding to a particular configuration or profile of individual preferences. The Arrow problem is to devise a rule that associates a social preference ordering with every logically possible profile of individual orderings. Since all of the single profile extensions of social choice theory require independence plus neutrality, these extensions are of interest primarily from the standpoint of mathematical politics. Thus, the principal message of this paper is that from the perspective of mathematical politics, the theory of social choice has significant implications in the single profile as well as the multi-profile context.

The article discusses conditional demand function and its application to the problems in the theory of consumer behavior. If the individual's allotment of the preallocated good remains fixed, his conditional demand functions meet all the requirements satisfied by ordinary demand functions. Conditional demand functions are an appropriate tool for analyzing consumer behavior in several situations. Consumers, like firms, have commitments which are fixed in the short run, so it is useful to distinguish between long-run and short-run consumer behavior. Conditional demand functions can also be used to deal with nonmarket goods. For example, the availability of goods provided by the government without charge to the user may affect the individual's preference between collections of goods available on the market. In this case, variables representing the availability of goods of this type will appear as arguments of the individual's utility function and his demand functions. Thus, the availability of free public tennis courts may affect the way an individual allocates a given total expenditure between tennis balls and other goods.

If an individual's utility function is additive and his demand functions exhibit expenditure proportionality, it is well known that his utility function belongs to the "Bergson family". For some problems (e.g., deriving a consumption function from an intertemporal utility function) expenditure proportionality is a useful simplifying assumption. But for demand analysis the assumption that all income elasticities are unity has little merit even as a first approximation. In this paper I investigate the class of additive utility functions yielding demand functions which are locally linear in income, or, equivalently, yielding income-consumption curves which are linear in some region of the commodity space. The assumption that income-consumption curves for broad aggregates of goods are locally linear is not grossly inconsistent with our knowledge of the world, so this class of utility functions and the corresponding demand functions may be of empirical as well as theoretical interest. In the first section I consider various additive direct utility functions which yield demand functions locally linear in income, and, in the second section, the corresponding indirect utility functions. In the third section I prove that the utility functions considered in Section I are the only additive direct utility functions yielding demand functions locally linear in income. In the fourth section I consider the "counterparts" of the utility functions of Section I (i.e. the additive indirect utility functions obtained by replacing each quantity variable by its dual price variable). In Sections I and IV, I present explicit expressions for the demand functions corresponding to each utility function considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]