Whose Fast and Whose Feast? Intrahousehold Asymmetries in Dietary Diversity Response Among East African Pastoralists

In this paper we explore intrahousehold dietary diversity allocation within pastoralist households in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia. We estimate income elasticities of dietary diversity for household demographic cohorts and allow cohort-specific responses to differ depending on the circumstances of the household. Statistical tests show that individuals exhibit asymmetric responses to household income when it is above vs. below the household's intertemporal mean income. Further, we find that household heads appear to disproportionately bear the nutritional burden when household income is below its mean while other household members appear to disproportionately enjoy the nutritional gains when household income is above its mean. The commonly assumed symmetric framework masks this intrahousehold behavior and produces biased elasticity estimates. Additionally, we perform stochastic dominance tests on simulated cohortspecific dietary diversity distributions. These tests show that adult daughters are slightly better-off than other household members in their dietary diversity, sons are systematically worse-off and there seems to be little difference between male household heads and their wives