Urban Land Use and the Growth in Two-Earner Households
分析双职工家庭与单职工家庭在住房消费、居住地点选择上的差异，探讨收入、通勤成本和家庭结构如何影响其住房决策，对城市规划和住房政策研究者有参考价值。
Two-earner households differ from oneearner, husband-wife households in other ways than the number of earners. They have higher money incomes; they are smaller and also less likely to include young children; they have less adult time. Urban residential location choices have traditionally been explained in terms of tradeoffs between housing consumption and job accessibility. These differences in income, household composition, number of workplaces, and available leisure time thus suggest that the residential and work location choices, and housing demands of two-earner households differ from those of other households. Because two-earner households have higher money incomes and because recent empirical studies have found the income elasticity of housing demand in the United States to be greater than one (see Edwin Mills), two-earner households are expected to consume more housing. Because the housing expenditure savings from a more suburban location increase as housing consumption increases, households who consume larger amounts of housing (i.e., twoearner) are expected to find suburban locations more attractive, ceteris paribus. On the other hand, two-earner households have members commuting to two jobs. This suggests that commuting costs are doubly incurred and that access to jobs plays a larger role in their residential location decision. If employment of both spouses tends to be centrally located, the total commuting costs associated with more suburban locations are higher for two-earner than for one-earner households. Alternately, if one spouse is employed at a suburban location (see Michelle White), some suburban locations may offer proportionately lower commuting costs for two-earner than for oneearner households. To the extent that: 1) employment location is determined by residential location and commuting preferences of employees; and 2) either two-earner households locate differently than oneearner households, or employed wives have different commuting preferences than other employees, the increasing labor force participation of married women will also affect the rate of suburbanization of employment. Finally, besides having higher money incomes and more job locations to access, two-earner households may differ systematically from one-earner households in their preferences for particular housing characteristics such as neighborhood and density. This paper analyzes the net effect of income, commuting costs, and housing composition on the household's choices of house size, house location relative to employment location, and other housing characteristics for two-earner and one-earner households. In the first section a household decisionmaking model of location and housing consumption is developed; the second section discusses the data used to estimate the model; the third section discusses the estimation procedure and presents the empirical results; the final section presents the conclusions.