Estimation of alternative models of female labour supply with fixed travel costs

Abstract

We formalise the joint choice of labour force participation and mode of travel to work together with the hours of work decision for unitary and collective households. Conditioning on the primary workers decisions, we analyse the decisions of the secondary worker in a simplified setting in which the amount of work travel is independent of hours of work. On a matched sample from the BHPS and the NTS we find that car ownership is important in modal choice but the correlation between modal choice and the participation decision is negligible. We find that households behave somewhere between unitary and collective households in partially pooling groups of individual expenditure or income items.