Children's Resources in Collective Households: Identification, Estimation and an Application to Child Poverty in Malawi

Geoffrey Dunbar, Arthur Lewbel and Krishna Pendakur

No 758, Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics

Abstract: The share of household resources devoted to children is hard to identify, because consumption is measured at the household level, and goods can be shared. Using semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences within a collective model, we identify how total household resources are divided up among household members, by observing how each family member's expenditures on a single private good like clothing varies with income and family size. Using data from Malawi we show how resources devoted to wives and children vary by family size and structure, and we find that standard poverty indices understate the incidence of child poverty.

Keywords: Collective Model; Cost of Children; Bargaining Power; Identification; Sharing rule; Demand Systems; Engel Curves (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C31 D11 D12 D13 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-06-01, Revised 2012-01-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev and nep-ltv
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Published, American Economic Review, 2013, 103, 438-471

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Related works:
Journal Article: Children's Resources in Collective Households: Identification, Estimation, and an Application to Child Poverty in Malawi (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boc:bocoec:758

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