Giving cash to families with disabled kids often fails because the real bottleneck is the parents stopping working together.
SSRN · March 18, 2026 · 6273980
The Takeaway
Using 'biform game' theory, researchers found that the added stress of a disability lowers spousal cooperation by 33%. Because policy interventions focus on giving cash rather than repairing the internal 'negotiation' between husband and wife, even large increases in financial support fail to close the welfare gap.
From the abstract
Do households cooperate or not? Existing models force a binary choice between full cooperation and non-cooperation, yet reality likely lies in between. I develop an empirical biform game framework that identifies the degree of spousal cooperation from data. The model treats enforceable decisions (labor supply) cooperatively and non-enforceable decisions (childcare) non-cooperatively, with a caring parameter nesting both extremes. Equilibrium uniqueness and monotonicity properties deliver a novel