The Effect of Women’s Bargaining Power on Child Nutrition in Rural Senegal

We examine how women’s bargaining power affects child nutritional status using data from rural Senegal. In order to correct for the potential endogeneity of women’s bargaining power we use information on a mother’s ethnicity relative to that of the community she resides in order to construct an arguably exogenous exclusion restriction. While standard OLS estimates suggest that if a mother has more bargaining power, her children will have a better nutritional status, our IV estimates indicate that the true impact is underestimated if the endogeneity of bargaining power is not taken into account.