The policy failures associated with inappropriate acceptance of unitary models of household behavior are more serious than those associated with inappropriate acceptance of collective models, contend the authors. They support this claim with illustrations. Consider, for example, the effect of...

Until recently, most economists viewed the household as a collection of individuals who behave as if in agreement on how best to combine time and goods (purchased or produced at home) to produce commodities that maximize some common welfare index. This model has been extended far beyond standard...

How rapidly will child malnutrition respond to income growth? This article explores that question using household survey data from 12 countries as well as data on malnutrition rates in a cross-section of countries since the 1970s. Both forms of analysis yield similar results. Increases in income...

This paper uses a noncooperative bargaining model to motivate an empirical analysis of the determinants of household expenditures. Drawing on a national household survey from the Cote d'Ivoire, the authors find that raising women's share of cash income increases the budget share of food and...

The object of this paper has been, first to develop a framework for upper-limit indicator targeting, and to illustrate it for age based targeting of nutrition interventions using data from the Philippines. Second, the authors provide quantitative estimates of the value of individual level...

In this report the authors develop a framework for assessing the consequences of ignoring intrahousehold inequality in the measurement and analysis of poverty and inequality. They apply this framework to data for the Philippines and conclude that : 1) the result of neglecting intrahousehold...