basic needs (CBN) approach in 1995-96 are Takas 593 and 492 in site 1, 529 and 484 in site 2, 592 and 499 in site 3, and 591 and 499 for national rural households. Comparison of HES sample with site specific poverty incidence based on CBN gives a mixed picture with some sites in some rounds having higher poverty rates compared to national rural average and vice versa. Similar to monthly per capita expenditure, poverty incidence varies substantially across rounds. Based on CBN, the highest poverty incidence in all sites are observed in round 2, while based on DCI, the poverty peaks in round 3. As mentioned, round 2 contains the major lean season, while round 3 the minor one.

**Spouses’ characteristics - age, education, and assets at marriage** : On average, husbands are about 8 years older than their wives. To focus on bargaining between husbands and wives, following Quisumbing and Maluccio (2003), I restrict the sample to monogamous households<sup>15</sup> with husband and wife present and with no change in marital status (i.e., divorce, separation, re-marriage, death, etc.) during the survey period. The resulting sample selection bias (if any) would lead to a conservative estimate of bargaining effects as households in which the disagreement between the spouses are the strongest would be more likely to split and are thus absent in this sub-sample.

The marriage module of the survey asked the heads and their wives the assets they owned at the time of their wedding. These assets included land, cattle, housing, food items, and durable (jewelery, watch, clothes, and household utensils). The reported values of these assets at the time of marriage were converted in 1996 taka using national consumer price index. Bangladeshi wives had far less assets at the time of their marriage than their husbands primarily because their value of landholding, housing, and cattle were much less than those of their husbands (see Table 1). The assets at marriage may suffer from measurement errors due to recalling information, particularly for longer marriages. One option is to instrument spouses’ assets by their respective family background information, such as the wealth of their parents. However, those measures may also suffer from recall errors. Hence, I do not instrument these bargaining measures. To the extent the measurement errors are white noise, the evidence of bargaining (if any) will be an underestimation of the true bargaining effects. Education is measured by years of schooling. The mean years of schooling of husbands is almost double of that of wives.

While spouses’ assets at marriage are my key bargaining measures, following Quisumbing and Maluccio (2003), in the empirical analysis, I also include spouses’ age and age square to control for cohort effects, and for the possibility that their age difference could be another source of

> 151% of households have two wives, while 4.5% are female headed with no husband, and 3% have head without his wife. 91% households are intact with both head and his spouse. Based on data availability of assets at marriage, my analysis contains almost 98% of these intact households, or, roughly 89% of the all surveyed households.

17