38 PA R T I INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

case, we were considering two goods. Now, the single mother is considering
one good (food consumption) and one bad (labor, since we assume she
would rather be at home than at work). The trick to modeling this decision is
to model the demand for leisure, the good that is the counterpart of labor.That
way, we can model the trade-off between two goods using our existing tools
and then compute the amount of labor supplied as total work hours minus
hours of leisure.

Identifying the Budget Constraint

Suppose that Joelle can work up to 2,000 hours per year at a wage of $10 per
hour, that she has no other source of income, and that there is not yet a TANF
program in place. By working one less hour in a year, Joelle will lower her
consumption by $10 and increase her leisure time by one hour. Thus, the
price of one hour of leisure time is the hourly wage rate. This fact follows from the
principle of opportunity cost: when Joelle opts to take an hour of leisure, her
next best alternative activity is to work.Thus, the price of the hour of leisure is
$10, the forgone wage she could have earned if working.
The price of food consumption is given directly by the market; lets say
that it is $1 per unit of food. This means that Joelle faces a trade-off: each
hour of work brings her 10 units of food, and each hour off from work
(leisure) costs her 10 units of food. If Joelle can work up to 2,000 hours per
year, we can now identify her budget constraint as line ABC in Figure 2-8:
she can consume a maximum of $20,000 of food per year, a maximum of
2,000 hours of leisure per year, or any combination in between. The slope

FIGURE 2-8

Food
consumption The Consumption-Leisure Trade-off
(dollars) Joelle has a choice of taking more leisure
A
$20,000 and consuming less, or taking less leisure
(working harder) and consuming more. If
she takes no leisure, she can have con-
Slope = 10 sumption of $20,000 per year; but if she
takes 2,000 hours of leisure, her consump-
tion falls to 0. This is represented by the
B budget constraint with a slope of 10, the
Budget constraint relative price of leisure in terms of food
consumption.

C
0 2,000 Leisure (hours)