|(0.794)<br>(0.706)<br>N<br>9186<br>450|(0.732)<br>258|(0.666)<br>152|
|---|---|---|
|**~~Notes:~~** ~~Standard deviations reported~~in~~parenthesis. Differ~~<br>level.***p<0.01,**p<0.05,*p<0.1|~~ences compute~~|~~d~~with~~standard errors clustered at~~village|

# III. EMPIRICAL STRATEGY

The equation of interest is one in which I estimate the shifts in the shares of total household expenditure from one category of consumption goods to the other when the parent that migrates is the mother rather than the father. This is: where on the left-hand side is the share of total household income allocated to expenditure for commodity _i_ by household _h_ , and on the right-hand side is the (log) number of members in the household _nh_ together with several household’s observable characteristics _Xh_ and a term _Fh_ equal to one if the household is one in which the mother of the children has migrated, while the father did not, and zero if instead it was the father who is away and the mother remained with the children. The coefficient of interest is _γ_ , associated with the term _Fh_ ; this provides us with a measure of the _difference_ between the budget allocation of households with migrant mothers and households with migrant fathers.

Equation (14) provides an empirical test of propositions 2 and 3. We will consider that there are some types of goods that are exclusively consumed by adults ( _Xm_ and _Xf_ ), while all other goods are, to different extents, consumed by both adults and children ( _Z_ ). Specifically, expenditure for food, health, education, and durables will be proxies of _Z_ , where education is a purely child-related expenditure, while food, health, and durables also partly pertain to adults; on the other hand, alcohol, tea, coffee, and tobacco will proxy for adults’ exclusive private consumption, following Deaton (1989).<sup>15</sup> Estimating the effects of migration and how they differ depending on the gender of the migrant spouse entails problems of endogenous selection into treatment of two types, as suggested in table 4: first there is a problem of _selection into migration_ as households that decide to send some member out for migration will likely differ from the others on both observable and unobservable characteristics; second, there is a problem of _selection into female migration_ because households from which it is the mother that migrates are likely to differ from those from which the father migrates in a number of unobservable factors that might as well influence the outcomes of interest.

> 15 Note that these adult goods are typically consumed more by men than women. In female headed households, the share of total income spent on these items is about 2% for each adult member, while in male headed households over 4%. This difference is larger if one compares households with no adult men with households with no women, in the former the share of total income spent on alcohol, tea, coffee, and tobacco is about 2.6% per adult, while in all men households it exceeds 9%. These figures, therefore, confirm that men have stronger preferences than women for this type of goods but also show that women, too, consume positive amounts of them.

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