Collective female labour supply: theory and application

This article deals with female labour supply in the collective framework. It studies married couples and starting from the empirical observation that the husband's labour supply is generally fixed at full‐time. It shows that, in this case, structural elements of the decision process, such as individual preferences or the rule that determines the intra‐household distribution of welfare, can be identified if household demand for at least one commodity, together with the wife's labour supply, is observed. These theoretical considerations are followed by an application using French data.