Thesis advisor: Arthur Lewbel / The dissertation consists of three essays on different aspects of the collective household models in the household economics literature. The first essay estimates a collective household model for evaluating the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) among older households. I use longitudinal Homescan data to identify SNAP-eligible food. I find that husbands have relatively stronger preferences for food than wives, and that household demand is affected by bargaining power (i.e., control over resources) within households. Failure to account for this difference in preferences and control leads to underestimates of older couples' total food demand, and of their implied response (at both intensive and extensive margins) to a counterfactual experiment of replacing SNAP with a cash transfer program. I find that most eligible older households spend more on SNAP-eligible food than would be allowed by their SNAP benefits. Their spending patterns suggest that their poor diet is mainly due to low income rather than tastes. Overall these findings imply that a SNAP comparable cash transfer can be an effective tool to achieve the goals of the SNAP program. The second essay is joint work with my advisor Arthur Lewbel. We first prove identification of coefficients in a class of semiparametric models. We then apply these results to identify collective household consumption models. We extend the existing literature by proving point identification, rather than the weaker generic identification, of all the features of a collective household (including price effects). Moreover, we do so in a model where goods can be partly shared, and allowing children to have their own preferences, without observing child specific goods. We estimate the model using Japanese consumption data, where we find new results regarding the sharing and division of goods among husbands, wives, and children. The third essay is a joint paper with Tomoki Fujii. We study the intra-household inequality in resource allocation and bargaining within Japanese couples without children. We exploit a unique Japanese dataset in which individual private expenditures, savings, and time use information are available. From the data, we find that on average, the husband enjoys 1.5 times more purely private expenditures than the wife. However, the data only provides resource allocation on purely private expenditures, while 68 percent of household expenditures are devoted to the family, i.e., joint expenditures. We refer to the collective household literature in order to recover the unobserved sharing of total household expenditures, including both private and public goods. We find that the model-predicted sharing pattern is moderately consistent with the individual expenditure data. However, the intra-household inequality would be underestimated if we only use the sharing in purely private expenditures from the data. We find that Japanese wives are relatively disadvantaged to their husbands, no matter in purely private expenditures, total household expenditures, or gains from marriage. The findings in this paper provides certain external validity in terms of the collective household model of consumption, which we argue should be widely adopted in analyzing individual welfare in multi-person households. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

In Chapter 1, which is co-authored with Rossella Calvi and Arthur Lewbel, we show that a local average treatment effect (LATE) can sometimes be identified and consistently estimated when treatment is mismeasured, or when treatment is estimated using a possibly misspecified structural model. Our associated estimator, which we call Mismeasurement Robust LATE (MR-LATE), is based on differencing two different mismeasures of treatment. In our empirical application, treatment is a measure of empowerment: whether a wife has control of substantial household resources. Due to measurement difficulties and sharing of goods within a household, this treatment cannot be directly observed without error, and so must be estimated. Our outcomes are health indicators of family members. We first estimate a structural model to obtain the otherwise unobserved treatment indicator. Then, using changes in inheritance laws in India as an instrument, we apply our new MR-LATE estimator. We find that women's empowerment substantially decreases their probability of being anemic or underweight, and increases children's likelihood of receiving vaccinations. We find no evidence of negative effects on men's health. Then, using changes in inheritance laws in India as an instrument, we apply our new MR-LATE estimator. We find that women's empowerment substantially decreases their probability of being anemic or underweight, and increases children's likelihood of receiving vaccinations.In Chapter 2, which is co-authored with Alexander Wolf, we take the Dunbar et al (2013) (DLP) model and explore its strength and weaknesses at recovering information regarding household sharing of resources. DLP develop a collective model of the household that allows to identify resource shares, that is, how total household resources are divided up among household members. We show why, especially when the data exhibit relatively flat Engel curves, the model is weakly identified and induces high variability and an implausible pattern in least squares estimates. We propose an estimation strategy nested in their framework that greatly reduces this practical impediment to recovery of individual resource shares. To achieve this, we follow a shrinkage method that incorporates additional (or out-of-sample) information on singles and relies on mild assumptions on preferences. We show the practical usefulness of this strategy through a series of Monte Carlo simulations and by applying it to Mexican data. The results show that our approach is robust, gives a plausible picture of the household decision process, and is particularly beneficial for the practitioner who wishes to apply the DLP framework.Finally, in Chapter 3, which is co-authored with Bram De Rock and Tom Potoms, we exploit the experimental set-up of a conditional cash transfers (CCT) program in Mexico to estimate a collective model of the household and to investigate how parents allocate household resources. This is important to understand because the success of policies aimed at fighting poverty depends crucially on how parents respond to monetary incentives. If parents allocate resources inefficiently (or non-cooperatively), the resulting level of well-being is likely to fall behind the socially efficient optimum. This is undesirable given the prevalence of CCT programs over the last two decades which have occupied a large percentage of governments' annual anti-poverty budgets. Although there is evidence that they have been beneficial, their effectiveness may still be limited. Our aim is to tackle this research question by estimating a theoretically-consistent demand system and by applying at best a powerful test of household efficiency developed by Bourguignon et al (2009). Contrary to previous results, we show that households make efficient decisions only at the beginning of the program, but fail to cooperate later on. In order to rationalize these results, we propose a simple model of household behaviour where decision makers may change their preferences as a result of a treatment that gives information about the importance of a public good. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished