New Evidence on Intra-Household Allocation of Resources in Japanese Households

This paper examines intra-household allocation of resources to gain insight into family relationships and gender bias in Japanese household expenditures. We take the Engel curve approach to examine how adult consumption is affected by the presence of a child, either a boy or a girl, in the family. Empowered by diary-based high quality spending data from the Family Income and Expenditure Survey, our empirical results show that adult consumption is significantly reduced in households with children; further, there is no evidence of gender discrimination between boys and girls in terms of the outlay equivalent ratios representing a reduction of the total amount of expenditure for adult goods, while responses of adult clothing expenses to the presence of a child are different between the case of a boy and that of a girl: spending on a father’s clothing is reduced when the child is a school-age daughter, while spending on a mother’s clothing decreases when a school-age son is in the home. Our analysis also shows that girls receive a larger share of spending for children’s clothing as well as for high school education than boys in recent years. Key words: Intra-household resource allocation, Family relationships, Gender bias, Japan. JEL Classification Codes: J16; D12; D13.