Children's Resources in Collective Households: Identification, Estimation, and an Application to Child Poverty in Malawi

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)

LATE with Mismeasured or Misspecified Treatment: An Application to Women's Empowerment in India

“…Recent advances in this literature permit the recovery of resource shares (or sharing rule), defined as each member's share of total household consumption (Lewbel and Pendakur (2008), Browning et al (2013), Dunbar et al (2013)). Our specific model is based on Dunbar et al (2013) and Calvi 1 Specifically, the instrument must satisfy the exclusion restriction and weakly increase the true treatment (Imbens and Angrist, 1994;Angrist et al, 1996).…”

“…Recent advances in this literature permit the recovery of resource shares (or sharing rule), defined as each member's share of total household consumption (Lewbel and Pendakur (2008), Browning et al (2013), Dunbar et al (2013)). Our specific model is based on Dunbar et al (2013) and Calvi 1 Specifically, the instrument must satisfy the exclusion restriction and weakly increase the true treatment (Imbens and Angrist, 1994;Angrist et al, 1996). In the case of a continuous misclassified treatment, Lewbel (1998), Song et al (2015), Hu et al (2015) and Song (2015) use instruments and further exclusion restrictions to obtain identification and estimation of average marginal effects with classical or nonclassical measurement error in a nonparametric or semiparametric context.…”

“…Here we summarize the derivation of our structural model, based on Browning et al (2013) (BCL) and Dunbar et al (2013) consumes. Unlike Q 1 ,...,Q T , the goods S may be shared and hence jointly consumed to some extent.…”

“…We estimate household resource shares for women and men in India using detailed expenditure data from the 2005-2006 National Sample Survey (NSS) of Consumer Expenditure and a methodology developed in Dunbar et al (2013). Due to the lack of NSS data on health outcomes, we then use these estimates to perform an out-of-sample prediction on the [2005][2006] Indian National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3), which includes the same socio-economic characteristics of individuals and households as the NSS dataset as well as detailed information about women's, men's and children's health status.…”

Intrahousehold Inequality

“…Although intra-household allocation is not (fully) observable, it can be recovered using specific, identifying assumptions that will be discussed later; that is the path borrowed by Lise and Seitz, but also by Chiappori, Fortin and Lacroix (2002), Dunbar, Lewbel and Pendakur (2013), Browning, Chiappori and Lewbel (2013) and many others in the literature. Clear progress has been made on this front over the last decades.…”