Household decision making on commuting and the commuting paradox

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.