It is frequently assumed that money in the hands of women leads to better out-comes for their children than money in the hands of men. However, empirical and theoretical evidence are mixed. We conduct a novel between-subject lab-in-the-field experiment to study whether increasing the wife's control over resources causes a couple to allocate more to their child. The paper provides two main insights. First, increasing the wife's bargaining power does not increase the share allocated to the child, but leads to more gender-equal allocations to children. Second, time preferences are important in explaining household decision-making; it is better for the child that the most patient spouse has more relative bargaining power. Our results highlight the importance of taking a broader set of preferences into account when studying household decision-making, and suggest that policy aimed to increase spending on children should target the spouse with preferences most aligned with such spending.

中文翻译：

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家庭讨价还价和儿童支出：来自坦桑尼亚的实验证据

人们经常认为，女性手中的钱比男性手中的钱更能为子女带来更好的结果。然而，经验和理论证据是混合的。我们进行了一项新的学科间现场实验室实验，以研究增加妻子对资源的控制是否会导致一对夫妇为他们的孩子分配更多。该论文提供了两个主要见解。首先，增加妻子的议价能力并不会增加分配给孩子的份额，而是会导致更多的性别平等分配给孩子。其次，时间偏好对于解释家庭决策很重要；最有耐心的配偶有更大的相对议价能力对孩子更好。