IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/29912.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Dads and Daughters: Disentangling Altruism and Investment Motives for Spending on Children

Author

Listed:
  • Rebecca Dizon-Ross
  • Seema Jayachandran

Abstract

This paper tests whether mothers and fathers differ in their spending on their daughters relative to their sons. We compare mothers’ and fathers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for specific goods for their children, diverging from the previous literature’s approach of comparing the expenditure effects of mothers’ versus fathers’ income. Our method, which we apply in Uganda, allows us to estimate gender differences and explore mechanisms with greater precision. A second innovation is that we examine why spending patterns differ between mothers and fathers, e.g., altruism, personal returns to investing in children. We find that fathers have a lower WTP for their daughters’ human capital than their sons’ human capital, whereas mothers do not. We also find evidence that altruism plays a role in the mother-father differences: fathers’ WTP for goods that simply bring joy to their daughters is lower than their WTP for such goods for their sons, but mothers’ is not.

Suggested Citation

  • Rebecca Dizon-Ross & Seema Jayachandran, 2022. "Dads and Daughters: Disentangling Altruism and Investment Motives for Spending on Children," NBER Working Papers 29912, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29912
    Note: CH DEV ED
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29912.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Pradeep Kumar Choudhury & Amit Kumar, 2022. "How Much do Households Spend on Professional Higher Education in India? Results from a National Survey," Indian Journal of Human Development, , vol. 16(1), pages 77-96, April.
    2. Hossain, Md Shahadath & Nikolov, Plamen, 2023. "Entitled to Property: How Breaking the Gender Barrier Improves Child Health in India," IZA Discussion Papers 16193, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    3. Ulugbek Aminjonov & Olivier Bargain & Maira Colacce & Luca Tiberti, 2022. "Culture, Intra-household Distribution and Individual Poverty," Working Papers - Economics wp2022_21.rdf, Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa.
    4. Olivier Bargain, 2022. "Income Sources, Intra-Household Allocation And Individual Poverty," Commitment to Equity (CEQ) Working Paper Series 121, Tulane University, Department of Economics.
    5. Yang, Jinyang & Chen, Xi, 2022. "Grandfathers and Grandsons: Social Security Expansion and Child Health in China," IZA Discussion Papers 15239, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    6. THIVILLON, Thomas, 2022. "Demand for informal caregiving and human capital accumulation: Evidence from elderly deaths in Senegal," SocArXiv m8k6b, Center for Open Science.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination

    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:nbr:nberwo:29912. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.