Microeconomics of the family and measurement of inequality.

Summary This thesis analyzes the impact of inequality within the family on inequality judgments about household income. It is assumed that homogeneous individuals are treated unequally within the family. The aim is to describe the sharing rules that preserve dominance in the Lorenz sense (relative, generalized, absolute) at the individual level. For the welfare analysis, the central condition (extended to the case of heterogeneous families) is the concavity of the sharing function. The inequality analysis highlights the role of other classes of partition functions consistent with the intuition that the richest households are also the most unequal. A microeconomic model derives the sharing rule in terms of the risk attitudes of the couple members. The relationship between the household poverty line and the individual poverty line is discussed before concluding with an axiomatic approach to poverty in the space of "capabilities" at Sen.