Gender discrimination, intrahousehold resource allocation, and importance of spouses' fathers: Evidence on household expenditure from rural India

Data collected from rural India was used to examine the rules governing intrahousehold resource allocations. Testing for gender-age discrimination among household members using Deaton's (1989) method, results suggest a general bias favoring boys over girls in allocation of consumption goods, however, the findings are not always statistically significant. Intrahousehold resource allocation rules are then examined to see if such discrimination is based on the unanimous decision of parents. The novelty in our test on allocation rule are: (1) use of grandparental variables as extra-household environmental parameters (EEPs) in expenditure estimation, (2) derivation of a test of the unitary model that only requires EEPs, and (3) semi-formal use of survival status of grandparents in testing collective models. It is interesting that spouse's father characteristics are importantly correlated with greater mother and child goods expenditure shares, and smaller father goods shares. Their survival status matters, and this is stronger evidence for a collective as opposed to unitary model.