Does gender and birth order matter when parent specialize in child’s nutrition?.Evidence from Chile

Abstract

Parental decisions have a profound effect on a child’s human capital development. Given the family’s endowment, the way parents decide how to allocate household resources has a direct impact on the child’s health and education. These decisions, in turn, may affect not only the productivity of the children once they have grown up, but also impact their life expectancy. It is in this context that the present paper emphasizes the impact of family resources and parental preferences on the provision of child health within the household. We explore child nutritional status and parental resources within households in Chile. Unlike the traditional family literature that conceives the household as a single decision-maker, we adopt an intrahousehold allocation approach, relax the unitary preferences assumption, and introduce a health production function to disentangle how parental preferences and differences in parental child-rearing technology affect the nutritional status of the child. In particular, we test whether there is any gender or birth-order differentiation by parents that could be captured through the nutritional status of the child, conditional on each parent’s characteristics. The gender and birthorder analysis is based on the machismo sentiment in both sexes that is often encountered in the Chilean family (Raczynski and Serrano, 1986). In addition, the birth-order hypothesis allows one to capture any parental apprenticeship