Family Size and the Distribution of Per Capita Income

   (345 K)

This paper is another contribution to the vast literature which addresses this issue: comparison of household income per capita among households of different structures requires judgment about the relationship between real income and family size. Our work uses a revealed preference approach in which household size/structure variables are included in empirical demand studies and the estimated coefficients on these variables are used to infer equivalence; it differs from many of the other studies not in basic concept but in its empirical strategy. While most studies build family composition effects into a relatively formal structural model of demand and impose considerable restriction in order to obtain an estimable system, we use a reduced-form approach which requires much less of the data.

Published: Lazear, Edward P. and Michael, Robert T. "Family Size and the Distributionof Real Per Capita Income." The American Economic Review, Vol. 70, No. 1, ( March 1980), pp. 91-107.

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