The Intra-Household Economics of Voice and Exit

This article evaluates the feminist and institutional dimensions of intra-household economics. A brief intellectual history of this emerging subfield of microeconomics argues that the weakness of the New Home Economics lies not only in its failure to deal with the individuals that make up the family, but also in its lack of recognition of systematic, gender- and age-based power relations which structure household resource allocation. A critical review of cooperative household bargaining models shows that while these effectively capture preference and externally-derived bargaining power heterogeneity among family members, they treat individuals symmetrically with respect to their ''voice'' (the right and ability to enter into the household bargaining process) and ''exit'' (the socially and economically constructed alternatives facing household members in the absence of a cooperative solution), and say little about the actual processes that lead to household resource allocation decisions. Noncooperative intra-household models, on the other hand, offer richer characterizations of household structures and processes, and can endogenously account for differences in power among family members. The final section proposes a research agenda emphasizing an interdisciplinary approach to both intrahousehold theory and empirical analysis.