The More Kids, The Less Mom’s Divvy: Impact of Childbirth on Intrahousehold Resource Allocation

We investigate how childbirth affects intrahousehold resource allocation for married Japanese couples. We develop reduced-form and structural-form specifications from a unified theoretical framework. Under a weak set of assumptions, we can focus on private goods to track the changes in intrahousehold resource allocation. Our estimation results show that the allocation of resources within household tend to move to the disadvantage of women after childbirth. One additional child is associated with at least 2.6 percentage points decrease in womens private expenditure share. Our estimation results reject the income-pooling hypothesis, and show that women are more risk averse than men.