Intrahousehold Allocations: A Review of Theories and Empirical Evidence

In this paper, we provide a survey of recent developments in the theoretical and empirical modelling of intrahousehold allocations. We focus on how the recent theory extends earlier models of household consumption and production behaviour, and in our discussion of empirical applications we focus on how the basic assumption behind the traditional household models, income pooling, is tested. We also briefly discuss recent extensions to income pooling tests. In the discussion of empirical work we try to lay out some of the difficult empirical problems related to endogeneity of covariates. In all of the empirical discussion, we focus on applications to human resources in low income countries.