The sectoral labor supply of married couples in Brazil: Testing the unitary model of household behavior

An assumption of the unitary model of household decision-making is that hou sehold members maximize one household utility function. This assumption imp lies that households pool their income and, therefore, the ownership of non wage income has no effect on household demand. In this paper, this implicat ion is tested by estimating multi-sector labor supply equations for men and women in Brazil. The results indicate that the unitary model is rejected i n the informal and self-employment sectors for men and the formal and infor mal sectors for women; in these cases own nonwage income has a significantl y negative effect on labor supply while spousal nonwage income has no signi ficant effect. JEL classification: D1, J2.