Gender Discrimination, Intrahousehold Resource Allocation, and Importance of Spouses’ Fathers: Evidence on Household Expenditure from Rural India. The Developing Economies

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