A key question in poverty and social protection policy is how to increase parental investments in children, including time, engagement, and child-directed spending. Many programmes, including government child benefits and conditional or unconditional cash transfers, pursue this objective by transferring resources to mothers.
The common rationale for targeting cash transfers to mothers is that doing so will increase child-directed spending. The rationale for this is usually gender equity goal and a belief that doing so will increase child-directed spending.
We study how mothers and fathers allocate resources to young children in a low-income setting, and how these allocations respond to interventions that aim to improve early childhood development. We used a lab-in-the-field experiment with 1,330 mothers and fathers of children under age two in Tanzania.
Our findings reconcile the rationale for targeting transfers to women and posit that, for policy design, we should not only investigate who is the more child-oriented at status quo, but also who is most responsive to policy.