Marriage Market, Parents' Bargaining Powers, and Children's Nutrition and Education

This paper examines how each parent's bargaining power affects intrahousehold resource allocations to children's nutrition and education. I test whether the marriage market condition summarized by the sex ratio affects the allocations and whether the parental resources are pooled. I also derive and test the consistency condition between the two test results. Using data from Indonesia, I find evidence that children's nutritional intake is positively correlated with the mother's household bargaining power, but education is uncorrelated with either parent's bargaining power. The estimation results are robust against alternative definitions of the sex ratio and the parental resources variables. I also investigate whether boys and girls are treated differently by their parents. I find evidence that an increase of the mother's bargaining power is likely to increase the boys' education but not the girls'