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.

The labor force participation of Jewish women in Israel increased between 1955 and 1980, accelerating in the 1970s. Schooling accounts for most of the change. The sharpest rise is among mothers ages 25-44. Thus differentials in participation by marital status have been sharply narrowed and the life cycle in participation has been transformed, the M-shaped curve being replaced by an inverted U with delayed labor force entry due to prolonged schooling and more continuous participation throughout the childbearing period. The reduced incompatibility between child rearing and market work is associated with part-time work and increased reliance on day-care services. The increased employment of women is concentrated in the service industries, mostly public, and is accompanied by some decline in the relative wage of highly educated women. Successive cross-section estimates corroborate this picture in general but do not support the notion that over time preschool children interfere less in women's labor supply.