IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecj/ac2002/25.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Parent Altruism

Author

Listed:
  • Bhalotra, Sonia

    (University of Bristol)

Abstract

This paper offers a method for testing altruism and applies this to investigate whether parents of young children in rural Pakistan are altruistic. The estimated "altruism coefficient" (defined in the paper) indicates the degree of altruism. Parent altruism is of evident interest in designing welfare programmes. Indeed, we show that parent altruism implies positive effects of parental income on child outcomes. Thus the effectiveness of income transfer programmes targeted at child poverty is conditional on the degree of parent altruism. The prediction of the altruistic model that is tested is that the demand for child goods is increasing in adult consumption, prices constant. M-demands provide the natural estimation framework. The test is conducted for a number of items of adult consumption. For all but tobacco the data decisively reject the null of selfishness. This result is robust to replacing child clothing with child schooling or child labour. We argue that the aberrant behaviour of tobacco may be understood in terms of its addictive properties. We also suggest that the results are consistent with fathers being less altruistic than mothers, tobacco being a predominantly male good.

Suggested Citation

  • Bhalotra, Sonia, 2002. "Parent Altruism," Royal Economic Society Annual Conference 2002 25, Royal Economic Society.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecj:ac2002:25
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://repec.org/res2002/Bhalotra.pdf
    File Function: full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sonia Bhalotra & Christopher Heady, 2003. "Child Farm Labor: The Wealth Paradox," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 17(2), pages 197-227, December.
    2. Sonia Bhalotra, 2007. "Is Child Work Necessary?," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 69(1), pages 29-55, February.
    3. Carol Ann Rogers & Kenneth A. Swinnerton, 2004. "Does Child Labor Decrease When Parental Incomes Rise?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 112(4), pages 939-968, August.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecj:ac2002:25. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christopher F. Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/resssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.