Alimony Rights and Intrahousehold Allocation of Resources: Evidence from Brazil

Marcos Rangel

No 505, Working Papers from Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago

Abstract: Household economic theory has largely relied on the concept of a "unitary" family decision-making model, in which the household can be considered the appropriate unit of decision-making. Exploiting an exogenous extension of alimony rights to cohabiting couples in Brazil, this paper presents robust empirical evidence challenging this assumption. Alimony rights improve women’s outside options, strengthen their negotiating positions, and increase their influence over the allocation of resources within intact partnerships. Econometric results corroborate this reasoning and indicate that more decision power in the hands of women affects both the hours worked by female adults and the pattern of investments in the human capital of children. These findings suggest that models of the family should take intrahousehold heterogeneity in preferences into account.

Keywords: Brazil; resource allocation; alimony; women (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://harrisschool.uchicago.edu/about/publication ... ers/pdf/wp_05_05.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to harrisschool.uchicago.edu:80 (nodename nor servname provided, or not known)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:har:wpaper:0505

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Eleanor Cartelli ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).