that girls who live with a grandmother who receives pension benefits weigh more than those who live with a grandmother who is not eligible to receive pension benefits. She also finds that young girls who were born in recipient households were taller than those who live in nonrecipient households. This suggests that pensions received by women translate into better nutrition for girls. In contrast, no effects of the pension were found in households where the pension was received by a man.

Rubalcava et al. (2004) offer evidence from a randomized social experiment. They investigate the impact of _Oportunidades_ , a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program aimed at reducing present and long-term poverty. The transfers are provided to women directly and are conditioned on investments in children’s human capital (education and health). Rubalcava et al. (2004) exploit the fact that the program was first introduced sequentially, communities were randomly assigned to the treatment or control group, and only households in treatment communities received the cash transfer. Since this cash transfer was provided to women, resources owned by women in the treatment group increased while no such change took place in the control group. Rubalcava et al. compare the marginal effect on household expenditure patterns of income received through the program with the marginal effect of other sources of household income. They find that controlling for total resources, additional cash transfers from the program resulted in higher shares of the household budget spent on education, children’s clothing and meat. The share spent on adult male clothing, transport and other food (mainly staples) declined.

_Changes in laws that improve women’s relative bargaining power_ . Economic theory predicts that husbands’ and wives’ control over how household resources are allocated depends not only on conditions within the marriage (such as asset ownership), but also on legislation that affects their wellbeing were the marriage to dissolve. Such legislation includes rules governing settlement of marital property, child support, custody and alimony (McElroy 1990). A large literature examining the impact of the changes in divorce laws in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s finds that these changes affected married women’s labor supply (see Mechoulan 2005; Stevenson 2007). In one of the few papers from a developing country setting, Rangel (2006) analyzes the impact of a 1994 change in Brazilian law that extended alimony rights to couples living in consensual unions or informal marriages; it .it did not change the rights of men or women living in formal unions. Combining data from the 1992, 1993 and 1995 rounds of the Brazilian Household Survey (PNAD) and using formally married couples as a comparison group, Rangel finds that the extension of alimony rights resulted in an increase in cohabiting women’s hours of leisure and to an increase in school attendance by their oldest daughters.

# _Mother’s health and education_

Independent of any impact on earnings or control over resources, improvements in mothers’ health and educational status is associated with better child development outcomes. Using data from Brazil, Thomas and Strauss (1992) show that maternal height has a large impact on infants’ height (length), while paternal height has no impact. Underweight mothers and mothers with micronutrient deficiencies before pregnancy are more likely to give birth to low-birth-weight infants (Galloway and Anderson 1994). Alderman and Behrman (2004) summarize evidence 6