This paper is concerned with the question of how couples should be taxed. One reason for the importance of this issue is simply that the overwhelming majority of individuals live in households formed around couples, and so it could be argued that empirically, this is the single most important problem in personal income taxation. A...

The 'new discrimination' refers to the use of government policy to increase the effective gender wage gap, measured in terms of the second earner’s net of tax income gain from working in the market place rather than at home. This paper presents an analysis of the tax treatment of family members and shows how the...

Patricia Apps and Ray Rees compare gender differences in the allocation of time to market work, domestic work, child care, and leisure over the life cycle, using survey data for three countries: Australia, the UK and Germany. They discuss the extent to which gender differences and life cycle variation in time use can be explained...

Patricia Apps, Ray Rees and Elizabeth Savage analyse the Howard government's recent Medicare reform. {C} Using models of the physician's behaviour and of a household's demand for medical insurance under the proposed system, they argue that those most likely to be made worse off are low income households with children, though a full evaluation of...

The aim of this paper is to explain why time use data are essential for analyzing issues of gender equity and the intra-household allocation of resources, for comparing living standards and for estimating the behavioural effects of changes in policy variables.