IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/i4rdps/137.html

A Comment on "Detecting Mother-Father Differences in Spending on Children: A New Approach Using Willingness-to-Pay Elicitation"

Author

Listed:
  • Buters, Nienke
  • Prochazka, Jakub
  • Schefbänker, Katrin
  • Strobl, Andreas
  • Teichmann, Karin

Abstract

This report inspects the reproducibility of a study by Dizon-Ross and Jayachandran (2023), which focused on differences in parents' spending on their daughters relative to sons on a large sample of 6,673 observations in 1,084 households in Uganda. The original study found that the willingness to pay (WTP) of fathers for different goods for their daughters was lower than for their sons. We were able to computationally reproduce all original results using the original data and code. To test for recreate reproducibility, we tried to reproduce the results of the main analyses using a new code and different software. We were not able to complete the reproduction without analyzing the original code and processed dataset. It was not clear from the manuscript nor the online appendix how the authors dealt with the multilevel structure of the data and how they controlled for different goods, which served as stimulus material. Because the raw data did not have clear labels and the replication package did not include a codebook, we were also unable to identify the variables needed for each analysis. However, after analyzing the original code, we were able to reproduce the original results in MPLUS. The missing code book and missing transcription of survey questions caused complications for investigating robustness reproducibility. Although the authors collected a large number of variables and provided them in the dataset, it was not possible to identify their meaning. Therefore, we were not able to conduct further analyses regarding the main findings of the study. Consequently, we only focused on multicollinearity checks and different constellations of the control variables reported in the paper within the robustness checks. Our analyses showed that the results of the study are robust in this respect. In addition, the missing code book and transcription of survey questions did not allow for direct replicability of the study. Conceptual replicability was not investigated.

Suggested Citation

  • Buters, Nienke & Prochazka, Jakub & Schefbänker, Katrin & Strobl, Andreas & Teichmann, Karin, 2024. "A Comment on "Detecting Mother-Father Differences in Spending on Children: A New Approach Using Willingness-to-Pay Elicitation"," I4R Discussion Paper Series 137, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:i4rdps:137
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/301426/1/I4R-DP137.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Brodeur, Abel & Mikola, Derek & Cook, Nikolai & Brailey, Thomas & Briggs, Ryan & de Gendre, Alexandra & Dupraz, Yannick & Fiala, Lenka & Gabani, Jacopo & Gauriot, Romain & Haddad, Joanne & Federice, A, 2024. "Mass Reproducibility and Replicability: A New Hope," I4R Discussion Paper Series 107, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
    2. Rebecca Dizon-Ross & Seema Jayachandran, 2023. "Detecting Mother-Father Differences in Spending on Children: A New Approach Using Willingness-to-Pay Elicitation," American Economic Review: Insights, American Economic Association, vol. 5(4), pages 445-459, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ferman, Bruno & Finamor, Lucas, 2025. "There must be an error here! Experimental evidence on coding errors' biases," I4R Discussion Paper Series 266, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
    2. Deer, Lachlan & Adler, Susanne J. & Datta, Hannes & Mizik, Natalie & Sarstedt, Marko, 2025. "Toward open science in marketing research," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 42(1), pages 212-233.
    3. Rose, Julian & Neubauer, Florian & Ankel-Peters, Jörg, 2024. "Long-Term Effects of the Targeting the Ultra-Poor Program - A Reproducibility and Replicability Assessment of Banerjee et al. (2021)," I4R Discussion Paper Series 142, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
    4. Noah Arman Kouchekinia & Cong Xu & Ryan McWay, 2026. "Spatial Polarization. A Replication Study of Cerina et al. (The Economic Journal, 2023)," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 41(3), pages 330-337, April.
    5. Chuang, Shih-Hsien & Holian, Matthew & Pattison, Nathaniel & Ramakrishnan, Prasanthi, 2024. "A Comment on "Populist Leaders and the Economy"," I4R Discussion Paper Series 157, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
    6. Bonander, Carl & Hammar, Olle & Jakobsson, Niklas & Bensch, Gunther & Holzmeister, Felix & Brodeur, Abel, 2025. "“Try to Balance the Baseline”: A comment on “Parent–teacher meetings and student outcomes: Evidence from a developing country” by Islam (2019)," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 175(C).
    7. Marcus, Jan, 2025. "Replication code as a cornerstone of the credibility revolution 2.0," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 117(C).
    8. Le Foll, Elen & Leung, Anna Yi & Nießen, Désirée & Poppa, Caroline, 2025. "A Comment on Arechar et al.'s (2023) "Understanding and Combatting Misinformation Across 16 Countries on Six Continents"," I4R Discussion Paper Series 277, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
    9. Degroot, Jean & Gobbi, Paula E. & Ramos, Alejandra & Wei, Xinyu, 2024. "A Comment on "Kin Networks and Institutional Development"," I4R Discussion Paper Series 126, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
    10. Collins, Jason & Denham, Amanda Baptista & Du, Zhuoran & Waller, David, 2024. "A Comment on "Influence Motives in Social Signaling: Evidence from COVID-19 Vaccinations in Germany"," I4R Discussion Paper Series 139, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
    11. Ankel-Peters, Jörg & Brodeur, Abel & Dreber, Anna & Johannesson, Magnus & Neubauer, Florian & Rose, Julian, 2024. "A Protocol for Structured Robustness Reproductions and Replicability Assessments," I4R Discussion Paper Series 143, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
    12. Joonkyo Hong & Davide Luparello, 2025. "Unveiling Plant-Product Productivity via First-Order Conditions: Robust Replication of Orr (2022)," Papers 2501.19354, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2025.
    13. Awaworyi Churchill, Sefa & Smyth, Russell & Trinh, Trong-Anh, 2025. "Gender norms and solar panel energy adoption in Australia: Evidence from a natural experiment," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(C).
    14. La Nauze, Andrea & Tan, Tze Yong, 2024. "A Comment on "Informed Enforcement: Lessons from Pollution Monitoring in China" by Sebastian Axbard and Zichen Deng," I4R Discussion Paper Series 144, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
    15. McWay, Ryan & Braaksma, Matthew, 2025. "The political consequences of resource scarcity: Targeted spending in a water-stressed democracy. A replication study of Mahadevan and Shenoy (Journal of Public Economics, 2023)," World Development Perspectives, Elsevier, vol. 39(C).
    16. Clerc, Melchior & Gosselin-Pali, Adrien & Wendling, Eliot, 2024. "A Replication of Macchi (2023): "Worth Your Weight: Experimental Evidence on the Benefits of Obesity in Low-Income Countries"," I4R Discussion Paper Series 145, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
    17. Thivillon, Thomas, 2025. "Demand for informal caregiving and human capital accumulation: Evidence from elderly deaths in Senegal," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(C).
    18. Gu, Jiancheng & Hauser, Christina Sarah & Zhu, Ziyue Jessie, 2025. "A Comment on "Acceptance of Inequality between Children: Large-Scale Experimental Evidence from China and Norway" by Cappelen et al. (2025)," I4R Discussion Paper Series 268, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
    19. Avila-Uribe, Antonio & Bierl, Konrad & Schulze, David, 2024. "A Comment on "Climate Change and Labor Reallocation: Evidence from Six Decades of the Indian Census" by Liu, Shamdasani, and Taraz (2023)," I4R Discussion Paper Series 162, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
    20. Iselin, John & McCulloch, Sean & Ryan, Erica, 2024. "A Comment on "Climate Change and Labor Reallocation: Evidence from Six Decades of the Indian Census"," I4R Discussion Paper Series 180, The Institute for Replication (I4R).

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:zbw:i4rdps:137. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.i4replication.org/ .

    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.