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AbstractAlthough existing studies have suggested that men's leave‐taking positively affects children's development and their involvement in childcare and household chores in the long run, the underlying mechanism remains unclear. To shed light on this ambiguity, this study develops a dynamic collective household model and analyses household decisions on parental leave‐sharing between spouses, resource allocation, home production, and labour supply. We demonstrate that gender equality in bargaining positions within families before leave‐taking is crucial in explaining the positive impacts of men's leave‐taking. Specifically, if women's intrahousehold bargaining power before taking parental leave is sufficiently low, their husbands are unlikely to take leave, and women's positions may deteriorate after leave. Consequently, households may allocate fewer resources to children, and men may not actively participate in childcare and household chores. Our model suggests that implementing parental leave policies for both genders may not be sufficient; simultaneous measures to increase women's bargaining power are necessary to encourage men to take parental leave and maximize the policies' benefits.

In this paper we consider an empirical collective household model of time allocation for two-earner households. The novelty of this paper is that we estimate a version of the collective household model, where the internally produced goods and the externally purchased goods are assumed to be public. The empirical results suggest that: (1) Preferences of men and women differ; (2) Although there are significant individual variations, on average the utility functions of men and women are equally weighted in the household utility function; (3) Differences in the ratio of the partners' hourly wages are explanatory for how individual utilities are weighted in the household utility function. (4) The female's preference for household production is influenced by family size, but this does not hold for the male; (5) Both the male and the female have a backward-bending labor supply curve; (6) Labor-supply curves are forward-bending with respect to the partner's wage rate; (7) Our model rejects the unitary Slutsky symmetry condition. -- Collective household models ; household behavior ; labor supply ; intra-household ; time allocation

This paper attempts to examine whether the predictions of the neo-classical economic models concerning intra-household resource allocation converge or conflict with the empirical findings on gender bias in resource allocation in India. While differentials in resource allocation are consistent with unitary models, biases and conflicts in resource allocation are not. Also, they suggest that women's earnings may enhance their well-being as a part of a rise in household welfare. Bargaining models and em pirical studies acknowledge the scope for, as well as the prevalence of, conflicts and gender bias in resource allocation. Further, both bargaining models and empirical studies suggest that women's earnings and education may enhance their bargaining power and thereby lead to favourable resource allocation. Thus, both have some amount of convergence. However, both models assume away the differences in individuals' interests and abilities, and their impingement on resource allocation decisions. Further, both models undermine the varying influence of sociocultural norms on household members in terms of hierarchy, power and resource allocation. Convergence and con flict have policy and welfare implications.