Children’s resource shares: male versus female-headed households

This is a comparative study of children’s resource shares in male-headed and female-headed households. To this end we estimate a household collective model using a rotating panel of households from the Jamaican Survey of Living Conditions over a period of 21 years (1990–2010). We find that the gender of the household head is important in determining individual resource shares within the household. Our results also indicate that children receive substantially larger resource shares in female-headed households than in male-headed ones and hence children who live in relatively poor female-headed households are not necessarily worse off. Additionally, the effects of household characteristics on the shares of children are shown to vary considerably based on the gender of the household head.