TY - JOUR AU - Lazear, Edward P AU - Michael, Robert T TI - Family Size and the Distribution of Per Capita Income JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 230 PY - 1981 Y2 - 1981 DO - 10.3386/w0230 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w0230 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w0230.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Edward P. Lazear Graduate School of Business Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305 Tel: 650/723-9136 Fax: 650/723-0498 E-Mail: lazear@stanford.edu AB - 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. ER -