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Are girls the fairer sex in India? Revisting intra-household allocation of education expenditure

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  • Mehtabul Azam and Geeta Gandhi Kingdon
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    Abstract

    This paper revisits the issue of the intra-household of education with the recently available India Human Development Survey which refers to 2005 and covers both urban and rural areas.� In addition to the traditional Engel method, the paper utilizes a Hurdle model to disentangle the decision to enroll (incur any educational expenditure) and the decision of how much to spend on education, conditional on enrolling.� Finally the paper also uses household fixed effects to examine whether any gender bias is a within-household phenomenon.� The paper finds that the traditional Engel method often fails to pick up gender bias where it exists not only because of the aggregation of data at the household-level but also because of aggregation of the two decisions in which gender can have opposite signs.� It is found that pro-male gender bias exists in the primary school age group for several states but that the incidence of gender bias increases with age - it is greater in the middle school age group (10-14 years) and greater still in the secondary school age group (15-19 years).� However, gender discrimination in the secondary school age group 15-19 takes place mainly through the decision to enroll boys and not girls, and not through differential expenditure on girls and boys.� The results also suggest that the extent of pro-male gender bias in educational expenditure is substantially greater in rural than in urban areas.� Finally, our results suggest that an important mechanism through which households spend less on girls than boys is by sending sons to fee-charging private schools and daughters to the fee-free government-funded schools.

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    Bibliographic Info

    Paper provided by University of Oxford, Department of Economics in its series Economics Series Working Papers with number WPS/2011-10.

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    Date of creation: 01 May 2011
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    Handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:wps/2011-10

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    Related research

    Keywords: Gender bias; Educational expenditure; Engel curve; Hurdle model; India;

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    1. Deaton, A. & Paxson, C., 1997. "Economies of Scale, Household Size, and the Demand for Food," Papers 178, Princeton, Woodrow Wilson School - Development Studies.
    2. Geoffrey Lancaster & Pushkar Maitra & Ranjan Ray, 2008. "Household Expenditure Patterns and Gender Bias: Evidence from Selected Indian States," Oxford Development Studies, Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 36(2), pages 133-157.
    3. Deaton, Angus S, 1989. "Looking for Boy-Girl Discrimination in Household Expenditure Data," World Bank Economic Review, World Bank Group, vol. 3(1), pages 1-15, January.
    4. Rozana Himaz, 2010. "Intrahousehold Allocation of Education Expenditure: The Case of Sri Lanka," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 58(2), pages 231-258, 01.
    5. Geeta Gandhi Kingdon, 1997. "Does the Labour Market Explain Lower Female Schooling in India?," STICERD - Development Economics Papers - From 2008 this series has been superseded by Economic Organisation and Public Policy Discussion Papers 01, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE.
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