Many key development outcomes depend on women's ability to negotiate favorable intrahousehold allocations of resources. Yet it has been difficult to clearly identify which policies can increase women's bargaining power and result in better outcomes. This paper reviews both the analytical...

Empirical evidence suggests that money in the hands of mothers (as opposed to fathers) increases expenditures on children. Does this imply that targeting transfers to women promotes economic development? In this paper, we develop a noncooperative model of household decision making to answer this...

Empirical evidence suggests that money in the hands of mothers (as opposed to their husbands) benefits children. Does this observation imply that targeting transfers to women is good economic policy? We develop a series of noncooperative family bargaining models to understand what kind of...

We study household formation in a model where collective consumption decisions of a household depend on the strategic choices of its members. The surplus of households is determined by individual choices of levels of friendliness to each other. A strategic conflict arises from a coupling...

It is frequently assumed that money in the hands of women leads to better outcomes for their children than money in the hands of men. However, empirical and theoretical evidence are mixed. We conduct a novel between-subject lab-in-the-Field experiment to study whether increasing the wife's...

A model of household decisions based on a bargaining approach is developed providing a comprehensive framework for the analysis of family behavior. Treating the family as an economic organization, household behavior is explained by the cooperation of utility maximizing individuals. The...

We study the impact of gender norms on the distribution of paid and unpaid labor between women and men in an intra-household bargaining model featuring endogenous social norms. In contrast to the previous literature, which assumes a homogeneous social norm, agents are connected via explicitly...