old-age pension benefits, conditional cash transfers, and loans from microcredit programs targeted at women (Duflo, 2003; Rubalcava et al., 2004; Pitt and Khandker, 1998). If participation in these programs is randomized or if a natural experiment can be designed, strong arguments can be made about the causal links between women’s control over resources and subsequent household decisions about resource allocation.

# _Mother’s control over resources and impact on child wellbeing_

Studies from both developing and developed countries consistently show that when mothers’ control over resources increases, households allocate more resources to children’s health and education.<sup>4</sup> One key empirical challenge in estimating the impact of spouses’ relative control over resources on allocation of resources to children or other family members is the measurement of the control variable itself. The challenge is to identify an exogenous source of relative control over resource allocation – one which is not an outcome of decisionmaking within the household (see Lundberg and Pollak 1996 for a discussion). Early contributions to the literature used shares of income as a measure of relative control over resources (e.g., Phipps and Burton 1992). However, individual labor supply and earnings can be an outcome of negotiation among husbands and wives and also reflect their relative price of time (wages) and hence are not an independent indicator of relative control over resources.

A large literature relies on non-labor (unearned) income or asset ownership of each spouse. This measure too might not be independent of the hours of labor supplied by each spouse. For example, assets owned today might have been financed using past earnings. To address this concern, several papers have examined the impact of assets brought in upon marriage, arguing that these are less likely to be affected by decisionmaking within the marriage (Quisumbing and Maluccio 2003). Certain types of programs can bring about a relative increase in wives’ resources and more recent studies have studied the impact of such programs, controlling for factors that affect participation in the program (Duflo 2003; Pitt and Khandker 1998). Another set of studies have exploited changes in laws that improve women’s relative bargaining power in the household (Rangel 2006).

_Impact of individual asset ownership and earnings._ Using household survey data, a number of studies show that increases in women’s control over household resources increase expenditures on family welfare, such as food and non-food items for children. Using household survey data from Ghana, Doss (1996) finds that the share of assets owned by women in urban households significantly affects household expenditure patterns. Among urban households, an increase in the share of assets held by women increases the budget share on food. Among both rural and urban women, the share of assets held by women has a positive effect on expenditures on schooling, while it has a negative effect on expenditures on alcohol, tobacco and recreation.

> the trends in assets and education, men’s educational and asset levels at marriage exceed women’s levels in all six countries.

> 4 The evidence comes from studies seeking to testing the unitary model of household decisionmaking that assumes that all members in the household have the same preference for allocating resources. These papers test the underlying assumption of “income pooling”, that is, that husbands and wives pool their resources and that the marginal impact of additional resources coming into the household is independent of the identity of the person who owns it (see reviews in Lundberg and Pollak, 1996; Haddad et al., 1997).

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