Gender Differences in Household Resource Allocations

Abstract

Using household survey data from the United States, Brazil, and Ghana, the authors examine the relationship between paternal education and child height, an indicator of health and nutritional status. In all three countries, the education of the mother has a bigger effect on her daughter's height; paternal education, in contrast, has a bigger impact on the son's height. There are apparently, differences in the allocation of household resources depending on the gender of the child and these differences vary with the gender of the parent. In Ghana, relative to other women, the education of a woman who is better educated than her husband has a bigger impact on the height of her daughter than her son. In Brazil, women's nonlabor income has a positive impact on the health of her daughter but not her son's health. If relative education of parents and nonlabor income are indicators of power in a household bargaining game, then these results suggest that gender differences in resource allocations reflect both technological differences in child rearing and differences in the preferences of parents.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.