Intra-Household Bargaining and Child Health Outcomes: Do Domestic Violence Laws Matter?

Ahmed Salim Nuhu

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In this paper, we explore a unique exogenous instrument to examine how the intra-familial position of women influence health outcomes of their children using micro data from Ghana. Using the 2SLS-IV estimation technique,we build a model of household bargaining and child health development with perceptions of women regarding wife-beating and marital rape in the existence of domestic violence laws, in Ghana. Even though the initial OLS estimates suggest that women’s participation in decisions regarding purchases of household consumption goods help to improve child health outcomes, the IV estimates reveal that the presence of endogeneity underestimates the impact of women’s bargaining power on child health outcomes. Our test for endogeneity also confirms that child-health investment decisions is mediated through domestic violence laws, which protect women from physical and sexual abuse in the household. Our instrument is also robust to rural residency and father characteristics controls.

Keywords: Keywords: Household Bargaining; Women Empowerment; Child Health Investment; Instrumental Variables; Domestic Violence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J13 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-dev, nep-hea and nep-hme
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/68630/1/MPRA_paper_68630.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/70478/1/MPRA_paper_70478.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:68630

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().