Household decision making on commuting and the commuting paradox
in: Peter Huber, Dieter Pennerstorfer, Digitalization, Urban Sprawl and Regional Economics – Selected Papers of the 10th WIFO Regional Economics Workshop at the
Austrian Institute of Economic Research, Vienna, 25-26 September 2017
This paper explores the commuting paradox in the context of two-partner households by estimating the relationship between
the subjective well-being of spouses and their commuting distances. Some of the former literature has found evidence that
individuals are not fully compensated for changes in commuting (the commuting paradox). We study unitary, cooperative, and
non-cooperative decision-making models to explore which describes the household decision on commuting in the data. We use
panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). The regressions show clear evidence for cooperative household decision
making on commuting distances (time) and do not show evidence of the commuting paradox. These results are robust in several
robustness checks, including alternative definitions of household utility.