Family Economics

Elisabeth Gugl's work focuses on policy evaluation in both the field of family economics or in the context of inter-jurisdictional competition. Her contribution in family economics has been threefold: modelling family decision-making, analysing policy and modelling parents' investments in their children. She examines these questions by building theoretical models that are quite complex, yet manageable. Many of her papers look at an economic outcome and explain it with a parsimonious model of people's preferences but enriched constraints under which individuals maximise their utility.

While at CESifo, Elisabeth Gugl will work on the impact of different forms of family taxation on intra-household inequality in a two-period bargaining model with renegotiation. A recent working paper by Gugl and Welling emphasises the importance of transferable utility in bargaining models that achieve efficiency even when spouses can renegotiate. Building on these results, Ms Gugl looks at various utility profiles for which transferable utility across time periods and across people does not hold. In this case changes in family taxation can potentially change the degree of inefficiency but also the degree of inequality in the household.

Elisabeth Gugl is an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Victoria, in Canada. She joined the University of Victoria in July 2003 after finishing her PhD in Economics at Rice University in Houston, Texas.