http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/39715442

Estimating the endogenously determined intra household balance of power and its impact on expenditure pattern : evidence from Nepal

The collective approach to household behavior relaxes the restrictive features of the unitary model by specifying household welfare as a weighted combination of the individuals' utilities. But the weights are assumed fixed or exogenous to the analysis. Koolwal and Ray extend the collective approach by proposing and estimating a framework where the weights are determined and simultaneously estimated with the household outcomes. The authors present Nepalese evidence that suggests that a woman's share of household earnings understates her "power" in making household decisions. An increase in the woman's educational experience leads to a rise in her bargaining power. The results also reveal some interesting nonmonotonic relationships between a woman's "power" and the household's expenditure outcomes. This paper--a product of the Office of the Senior Vice President, Development Economics--is part of a larger effort in the Bank to understand how gender affects development outcomes and to identify the causes of poverty. The authors may be contacted at [email protected] or [email protected].

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