Three essays on intra-household inequality and child welfare

This thesis consists of three essays that investigate inequality within the household with a particular focus on the effects of intra-household resource allocation and informal child fostering on the welfare of children. The first essay estimates individual resource shares within Ghanaian households using a modern household collective model. Our findings show that mothers, along with their children, tend to be more vulnerable to poverty than fathers because mothers tend to bear most of the cost of having children. Applying the same model to a panel data set of households, the second chapter conducts a comparative study of children's resource shares between male-headed and female-headed households in Jamaica. The results indicate that children tend to be allocated a higher share of resources in female-headed households and hence may not be necessarily poorer in terms of resource shares to children in male-headed households. The final essay investigates the effects of child fostering on two educational outcomes of children in Jamaica - school attendance and the number of years of schooling. We find that being a foster child in itself has a negative impact on the number of schooling years a child accumulates but has no significant effect on school attendance.