Household Food Expenditures, Parental Time Allocation, and Childhood Overweight: An Integrated Two‐Stage Collective Model with an Empirical Application and Test

Abstract

AbstractThis article develops a two‐stage collective household production model for household food expenditures, parental time allocation, and childhood overweight. The model fills four gaps in the literature: (i) the “black box” treatment of intrahousehold decision making, (ii) exclusion of the child's decision input, (iii) exclusion of noneconomic variables, and (iv) absence of theory‐supported instrument identification. The traditional unitary household production model with children is a special case of the model developed. Using a unique data set, the unitary model is rejected. There are important differences in the policy implications to be drawn from both models based on the data set used.