Parent Altruism, Cash Transfers and Child Poverty

This paper investigates the contemporary sharing of household resources between parents and co-resident children, motivated by the increasing popularity of cash transfers targeted at children, and limited evidence of their efficacy. It argues that this provides information on parental altruism which, though commonly assumed, has been challenged in recent research. The main finding is that the within-household allocation of resources is consistent with altruism. A further finding is that households that smoke (spend on tobacco) systematically spend less on children.