par Potoms, Tom 
Président du jury Gassner, Marjorie
Promoteur De Rock, Bram
Co-Promoteur Demuynck, Thomas
Publication Non publié, 2019-06-12
Président du jury Gassner, Marjorie
Promoteur De Rock, Bram
Co-Promoteur Demuynck, Thomas
Publication Non publié, 2019-06-12
Thèse de doctorat
| Résumé : | This dissertation has as main interest how households make important decisions over time. In the first part of the thesis I am interested in some theoretical aspects of this broad research question, first: what are some behavioral aspects of individuals' choice over time? Second: how can preferences be aggregated within a household? The first question is discussed in Chapter1 where I study a behavioral model of choice over time, in which a consumer derives utility not only from consumption, which I refer to as `event utility', but already from anticipating future consumption events. Furthermore, a consumer also obtains a disutility from recall of previous consumption events, due to the feature that the latter then act as a form of an anchor point with which new consumption events are compared. This generates a form of reference-dependency inside the preference structure of a consumer. In Chapter 2, I address a new property, the non-intersecting Pareto curves, which allows an ordering over Pareto curves defined in a certain environment, e.g. the marriage market or the couple's utility possibility frontiers conditional on the choice of a public good. It is shown that the important property of transferable utility, which allows simple aggregation of preferences among individuals is not equivalent to the non-intersecting property of Pareto frontiers, whereas the latter also allows for (relatively) simple aggregation of preferences. In the last two chapters of this dissertation, I consider a couple of very important policy-related research questions. In Chapter 3, I study the incentives of individuals to invest in their own human capital through on-the-job training programs. I find empirical evidence which suggests that being married can impede on training incidence. This, not necessarily intuitive result, can be explained through a theoretical framework where, within a couple household members share resources through some (cooperative) bargaining process. In this case, possible negative externalities on the spouse of a worker who participates in training can negatively affect the benefits of the latter, reducing the willingness to pay for such training programs. Moreover, the relative say inside the household also affects the way the costs of such training programs are shared and I show that the returns to participating in training are decreasing in such variables which imply higher share of total costs to be paid by the worker who is considering to follow training. This empirical framework then generates an important policy insight: namely that if policy makers want to stimulate workers to invest in their own training, they can do this by improving the relative bargaining power of the targeted group of workers within their households, possibly through less intrusive policies (w.r.t. the labor market) than more macro-orientated policies.The final chapter of this dissertation then brings several insights together and addresses a central research question in the field of intertemporal family economics and household behavior: how good are couples able to insure themselves against risk and shocks over the lifecycle? The literature has suggested that one important means by which couples have more scope for self-insurance compared to single individuals, is the presence of a secondary earner, who can increase his/her labor supply and thereby stabilize household income (the added worker effect.) The extent to which this channel is operative depends on many things, e.g. the particular financial position of the household (how much debts does the household have, what is its borrowing capacity etc.) and how income resources within the household are allocated among the household decision makers (intra-household bargaining). In Chapter 4, I therefore combine a 2-earner lifecycle model (including labor supply decisions of household members) with two features: first, households are faced with endogenous borrowing constraints, where the endogeneity stems from the fact that the amount of borrowing depends on the presence of a collateral assets, which I assume to be housing in my model. Furthermore, and consistent with the state-of-the-art in models in family economics, I allow for bargaining over resources among household decision makers, where the latter can't commit to fixed bargaining weights. The latter then implies that bargaining weights might change over the lifecycle due to shocks affecting the household (e.g. job loss of the primary earner, productivity shocks etc.) I then calibrate the structural model and do some interesting counterfactual exercises pertaining to a tightening or loosening of the credit market, affecting the ability of households to obtain collateral assets (and, therefore, affect their borrowing constraints.) |
