Intra-household decision-making, child welfare and gender in India

To the extent that the objective of most policy interventions is to improve individual well-being, it is essential to examine how public programs influence the behavior and the resource allocation decisions of families within which individuals reside. This dissertation, therefore, aims to further the understanding of the process of intra-household decision-making and thereby predict the impact of public interventions targeted at individuals. The thesis uses survey data, designed and collected by me, on a nationally mandated school meal program in India to examine the extent to which nutrient transfers to school children are reflected in overall increases in their daily intakes and its impact on school participation. The field experiment randomized the date of village interview yielding children in some villages recalling their 24 hour food consumption for a school day and in other villages on a non-school day. A comparison of the daily nutrient intake between these two days indicates that individual consumption of nutrients increased by 49% to 100% of the transfers. The results thus suggest little or no redistribution of resources away from a participating child by households. Next, taking advantage of the staggered implementation of the school meal program in the survey region I use a difference-in-differences analysis to show that the scheme led to a more than 10 percentage point increase in the monthly school attendance rates of girls. The program was thus effective in increasing household investment in schooling, particularly of girls. The findings imply that public programs which subsidize the cost of schooling and even implicitly target girls can be effective in reducing gender gaps in education. In the penultimate chapter I employ an intra-household bargaining model to investigate whether husbands' and wives' preferences on resource investment differs by gender and the order of birth of a child in India. The empirical results show a significant effect of mothers' autonomy and education on reducing the bias against girls' schooling. At the same time the findings suggest that the gender gap varies by the order of birth of children. The chapter emphasizes the need to account for the socio-cultural context in determining women's decision-making powers within the family which in turn can influence the allocation of household resources.