theory assumes that households maximize the welfare of all household members, and that the household functions collectively and has a single, cohesive objective. Neoclassical economic theory also assumes that individuals maximize their own personal utility, including, for example, deciding whether and how to share any personal income gains or agreeing to share tax burdens. Household-based surveys do not yet systematically capture how the income-based benefits received and the income losses from tax payments are shared among individual members of the household.<sup>10</sup> Understanding how the income gains and losses generated by transfers and taxes are allocated among individual household members is necessary to understand how fiscal policies create individual impacts. A class of empirical models has attempted to capture intrahousehold resource allocations using information on exclusive or assignable expenditures; an example of the former is spending on toys exclusively for children and of the latter is expenditure on clothing for boys, men, girls, and women (Lewbel and Pendakur 2008; Dunbar and others 2013; Chiappori and others 2002; Bose-Duker and others 2021; Bargain 2022). In describing how the intrahousehold allocation of resources creates inequality within the household, or varying levels of resource poverty for different members of the same household, these models allow a description of how intrahousehold inequality changes from pre-fiscal to post-fiscal income levels.

However, three practical disadvantages of empirical models of intrahousehold allocations make it hard to apply them widely and transparently to gendered fiscal incidence analysis. First, in low-income settings, and for lowincome households in low- and middle-income settings, assignable expenditures are infrequent and account for small shares of total household expenditure. Infrequent, marginal expenditures might provide unreliable estimates of how (total) income gains and losses are shared.<sup>11</sup> Second, available evidence suggests consumption magnitudes (for individual items) are themselves often imprecisely estimated. In Mexico in 2016, for example, the coverage rate – defined as the cumulative consumption expenditure magnitude for an item covered in a household survey divided by cumulative consumption expenditure (for the same item) from national accounts – of alcohol and tobacco expenditures was less than 10 percent while the coverage rate of education expenditures was more than 160 percent (Zwijnenburg and others 2021).

The third disadvantage helps distinguish our approach from empirical approaches to intrahousehold decision-making that make use of exclusive or assignable expenditures. In order to determine how individuals would allocate income gains to maximize their own individual utility, it is usually assumed that preferences for single individuals without dependents or spouses also describe the preference of similar individuals in households with children or elderly dependents (or both); with one, two, three, or more caretakers who may also be income earners; and with members that have both a fiduciary responsibility and intrinsic motivation to care for and

> 10. Individual-level data helpful for more precise estimates of the incidence of fiscal policies on individuals is time-use data, or records summarizing the differential time-use patterns of males and females, children, and the elderly, and (potentially) household members who are either temporarily or permanently absent. Beyond that, detailed individual-level information on assets, employment, income, and consumption expenditure could be used to provide individual-level impact estimates of fiscal policies.

> 11. Past expenditures on single items may also be unreliable for predicting future intrahousehold allocation or decision-making processes.

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