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We provide a method to estimate resource shares—the fraction of total household expenditure allocated to each household member—using OLS estimation of Engel curves.
The method is a linear reframing of the nonlinear model of Dunbar, Lewbel and Pendakur (2013), extended to allow single-parent and other complex households, scale economies in assignable goods and complementarities between non assignable goods, and supplemented with a linear identification test.
We apply the model to data from 12 countries, and investigate resource shares, gender gaps, and poverty at the individual level. We reject equal sharing, and find large gender gaps in resource shares, and consequently in poverty rates, in some countries.
Authors
Research Fellow University College London
Valerie, a Research Fellow of the IFS, is a Reader at the University College London, whose research is focused on modelling intra-household behaviour.
Research Fellow Simon Fraser University
Krishna is a Research Fellow at the IFS, a Professor at Simon Fraser University and has an Economics Endowed Professorship at Simon Fraser University.
Alexander Wolf
Working Paper details
- DOI
- 10.1920/wp.ifs.2021.1921
- Publisher
- Institute for Fiscal Studies
Suggested citation
V, Lechene and K, Pendakur and A, Wolf. (2021). OLS estimation of the intra-household distribution of expenditure. London: Institute for Fiscal Studies. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/ols-estimation-intra-household-distribution-expenditure (accessed: 25 April 2024).
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