According to the family utility function approach, the labor supply functions of married men should differ according to whether their wives also work. In this paper, I explicitly model the switching nature of labor supply while also accounting for the endogeneity of the labor force participation decision of the wife, using an endogenous switching regressions model based on the quadratic family utility function. The model is estimated from a cross section of 1,210 married couples from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

Because of the interdependent nature of family labor supply decisions, the nonnegativity constrai nt on women's hours of work will spill over into other consumption an d labor supply decisions of the family. Here the author develops an e conometric model of family labor supply that captures this "spillove r, " while addressing the usual censoring issues as well. The model i s based on a flexible direct utility function and permits unobservabl e differences in tastes. The model is estimated by the maximum likeli hood method on a sample of about 1, 200 families from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.