Parental preference, bargaining power, and child nutritional status: Evidence from the Bolivian Amazon

In recent years analysts have examined the effects of bargaining power over household economic decisions on individual well-being. Much of this work has focused on the determinants and consequences of women’s bargaining power. We build on this line of research by classifying households into three types of power structure based on whether the mother, the father, or both jointly decide on food purchases and preparation, and by estimating the association of each household power type on children’s nutritional status in a highly autarkic society of foragers and horticulturalists, the Tsimane’ of the Bolivian Amazon. Biases from self-perceived measures of parental bargaining power are overcome in two ways. First, we match the responses of the two parents to questions about who makes decisions related to food purchases and preparation. Second, we use parental attributes characterizing own well-being as instrumental variables for bargaining power. Using data from a survey done in 2004, we regress the body-mass index (BMI; kg/m) of 569 children