Separability between parents' and children's consumption is a necessary assumption in any attempt to impute the intrafamily allocation of goods. This assumption implies an estimation procedure where the observed effect of demographic variables on the marginal propensity to consume adult goods is used as a key for identifying the rule governing the distribution between children's and parents' consumption. Using the U.S. 1972 Consumption Expenditure Survey, I found that white and black families tend to allocate three-quarters of their consumption to parents and one-quarter to children. Tests for robustness, for selectivity bias, and of the separability assumption itself uphold these findings.

The wage differential between men and women is a thorn in the side of economists, theorists and empiricists alike. Theorists are by and large at a loss to explain the persistence of such a wage gap in a competitive environment, and empiricists are hard pressed to identify the factors that explain it.

Introduction R ECENT years have witnessed an awakened interest in the economic activity taking place outside the market, and in particular the activity taking place at home.This interest spurred by the new consumption theory of Becker and Lancaster and by the estimates of the Measure of Economic Welfare of Nordhaus and Tobin (1973) has taken two distinct forms: an increased number of studies on the economics of household behavior and a renewed effort to place a money value on the household home activity.However, while the major thrust of the first type of studies is in the field of microeconomics, the estimates of home production refer, in general, to the economy as a whole.These estimates, crude as they are, indicate that home production is far from being a negligible part of the economic activity.Even in an advanced economy such as the United States the value added generated by the home sector seems to account for over one third of the output produced at the market (Hawrylyshyn, 1976).In less advanced economies this fraction is presumably even higher.It seems, therefore, of interest to repeat the question in a microeconomic context and examine the role of home production at the household level, rather than in the aggregate.In contrast to past studies which have focused on the labor inputs going into home production (Sirageldin, 1969; Walker and Gauger, 1973), the emphasis in this paper is on the measurement of productivity and total home output.The questions I try to answer are: What are the factors

Adult equivalence scales are supposed to measure differences in the "needs" of households of different demographic composition. Formally, they purport to measure the change in the cost of attaining a certain welfare level when the family composition varies. This paper shows that the definition and the measurement of these scales depend crucially on the concept of welfare used. When welfare is the utility parents derive from their own consumption, one has to assume separability of parents' and children's consumption. This assumption implies that the only way of imputing the intrafamily allocation of resources is by observing the consumption patterns of adult goods. Regardless of the definition used, one cannot separate the factors reflecting home technology (i.e., "needs") from those determining the intrafamily distribution rule (i.e., "wants") out of consumption data.

Adult equivalence scales are supposed to measure differences in the "needs" of households of different demographic composition. Formally, they purport to measure the change in the cost of attaining a certain welfare level when the family composition varies. This paper shows that the definition and the measurement of these scales depend crucially on the concept of welfare used. When welfare is the utility parents derive from their own consumption, one has to assume separability of parents' and children's consumption. This assumption implies that the only way of imputing the intrafamily allocation of resources is by observing the consumption patterns of adult goods. Regardless of the definition used, one cannot separate the factors reflecting home technology (i.e., "needs") from those determining the intrafamily distribution rule (i.e., "wants") out of consumption data.