ABSTRACT
Economists have begun to examine household economic behaviour with the explicit recognition that individual preferences and access to resources within households may affect the outcomes of economic decisions. This approach contrasts with economic models of household behaviour which treat a household as a single economic actor and it is able to offer many policy relevant insights into their decision making. The analysis uses data from the 1991-2 Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS3). The income, consumption and expenditure data are quite detailed and much of the income and asset ownership data can be disaggregated to the level of individual household members. This chapter provides the theoretical framework to examine the impact of the distribution of asset ownership on household expenditures and to test whether a model that disaggregates asset ownership collapses to a unified model of the household. The effect of women's ownership of assets on the budget share of other household expenditures is also tested.
