 Identifying non-cooperative behavior among spouses: Child outcomes in migrant-sending householdsJournal of Development Economics, 2013, vol. 100, issue 1, 1-18 Abstract: I propose a model of household decision-making under asymmetric information and show that resulting allocations may not be fully cooperative. The model yields a simple test for cooperative decision-making, which I apply to data from China. I find that, when the father migrates without his family, children spend more time in household production, while mothers spend less time in both household production and income-generating activities. This is not consistent with standard cooperative models of the household: simply reallocating time to compensate for the father's absence would cause an increase in household labor for both children and mothers and, if migration occurs in response to a negative shock, we should observe an increase in mothers' time in income-generating activities rather than a reduction. The results also do not appear to be driven by an increase in mothers' bargaining power, as children's human capital is not affected by migration, controlling for income. Keywords: Migration; Intra-household allocation; Non-cooperative behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:100:y:2013:i:1:p:1-18 DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2012.06.006 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier |
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