Who gets to look nice and who gets to play? Effects of child gender on household expenditures

Krzysztof Karbownik and Michal Myck

Review of Economics of the Household, 2017, vol. 15, issue 3, No 10, 925-944

Abstract: Abstract We examine the relationship between a child’s gender and family expenditure using data from the Polish Household Budget Survey. Having a first-born daughter as compared with a first-born son increases the level of household expenditures on child and adult female clothing, and it reduces spending on games, toys and hobbies. This could be a reflection of a pure gender bias on behalf of the parents or a reflection of gender complementarities between parents’ and children’s expenditures. We find no robust evidence on gender differences in educational investment, measured by kindergarten expenditure. The analysed expenditure patterns suggest a so-far unexamined role of gender in child development. Parents in Poland seem to pay more attention to how girls look and favour boys with respect to activities and play, which could have consequences in adult life and contribute to sustaining gender inequalities and stereotypes.

Keywords: Gender differences; Household expenditures; Early childhood (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11150-016-9328-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:reveho:v:15:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_s11150-016-9328-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11150/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-016-9328-y

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economics of the Household is currently edited by Shoshana Grossbard

More articles in Review of Economics of the Household from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().