Keywords
Consumption (Economics) -- Thailand, Households -- Thailand, Resource allocation -- Thailand
Abstract
This dissertation consists of three chapters on the topic of intrahousehold resource allocation models. The first chapter tests the unitary and general collective models of intrahousehold resource allocation for various household compositions. I find that, for the quasiquadratic Engel curve specification, the overall results support the previous findings in the literature that the unitary model fails to explain how resources are allocated for all household types. However, when using the QUAIDS specification, the results can reject the unitary model only for smaller-sized households. The general collective model, on the other hand, cannot be rejected in either quasi-quadratic or QUAIDS and not in any of the household compositions. Overall, the results support the general collective model of household behavior rather than the unitary model. The second chapter derives and tests restrictions imposed by the collective model for households with more than two decision-makers in the absence of price variation. It extends the two-decision-maker model in chapter one to derive the testable restrictions for households with multiple decision makers using unconditional demand systems. Moreover, for comparison, a particular type of demand system that is conditional on distribution factors is also estimated as an alternative way to test the collective model. The results show that neither unconditional nor conditional demand systems can reject Pareto efficiency. Therefore, both approaches provide consistent outcomes supporting the hypothesis that the multiple-decision-maker households in Thailand behave in the Pareto efficient manner predicted by the collective model. Finally, my third chapter attempts to examine how one can exploit household-level consumption data to recover information about individual household members for situations with iv no price variation. By combining consumption data from single and couple households, I am able to estimate the resource shares and indifference scales (a variation of the standard equivalence scales in the collective settings) for each household member via a system of Engel curves. The results show that, in Thailand, wives are likely to have higher resource shares than husbands in the married-couple households, while wives with higher education have the ability to extract more household resources. However, resource shares for wives are smaller for older-married compared to younger-married couples. Moreover, if a female were to live alone, she would need approximately three-quarters of the couple‟s income to reach the same indifference curve, and hence the same standard of living, that she would attain as a wife in the married-couple household.
Notes
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Graduation Date
2011
Semester
Fall
Advisor
Dickie, Mark
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
College
College of Business Administration
Department
Economics
Degree Program
Economics
Format
application/pdf
Identifier
CFE0004150
URL
http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0004150
Language
English
Release Date
12-15-2016
Length of Campus-only Access
3 years
Access Status
Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)
Subjects
Business Administration -- Dissertations, Academic, Dissertations, Academic -- Business Administration
STARS Citation
Pamornpathomkul, Santikorn, "Three Essays On Applications Of Intrahousehold Resource Allocation Models" (2011). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1789.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/1789