Parental Preferences and Incentives for Early Childhood Nutrition Investment in Ghana

Abstract

This study employs two economic experiments-a dictator game and a Dizon-Ross and Jayachandran (DRJ) design-to assess parental altruism and the incentives shaping child-nutrition investments in Ghana.In the dictator game, fathers and mothers allocated more resources to children than to themselves or each other; joint decisions further increased child allocations.In the DRJ experiment without market price priming, fathers showed a higher willingness-to-pay (WTP) for enjoyment goods, whereas mothers showed a higher WTP for human-capital goods.Taken together, the results indicate that fathers play a significant role in strengthening early childhood nutrition.