Feed the Children

Abstract To understand the household decision-making process regarding food expenditures for children in poor households in Nairobi, we conduct an experiment with 424 married and monogamous couples. In the experiment, the spouses (individually and jointly) allocate money between themselves and nutritious meals for one of their children. We propose a novel and simple test to distinguish between cooperative/collective and non-cooperative decision behaviour. We find strong empirical support for the collective model of household consumption. This collective model indicates that the spouses’ structural bargaining weights derived from observed consumption patterns strongly correlate with more traditional indicators of power. Furthermore, our results suggest that women do not have stronger preferences for children’s meals than men. Finally, we document a significant heterogeneity in both individual preferences and intra-household decision-making processes.