American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Children's Resources in Collective Households: Identification, Estimation, and an Application to Child Poverty in Malawi
American Economic Review
vol. 103,
no. 1, February 2013
(pp. 438–71)
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 vary 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. (JEL I31, I32, J12, J13, O12, O15)Citation
Dunbar, Geoffrey R., Arthur Lewbel, and Krishna Pendakur. 2013. "Children's Resources in Collective Households: Identification, Estimation, and an Application to Child Poverty in Malawi." American Economic Review, 103 (1): 438–71. DOI: 10.1257/aer.103.1.438Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- I31 General Welfare
- I32 Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
- J12 Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure; Domestic Abuse
- J13 Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
- O12 Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
- O15 Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration