Estimating household resource shares: A shrinkage approach

Collective models identifying resource shares are promising tools to analyze intra-household welfare and poverty. However, their empirical application has proven difficult in practice as authors contend with large standard errors and unstable estimates. This paper uses a prominent framework to show how a common feature of the structure of these models makes the task so difficult and proposes an empirical strategy to stabilize the estimates. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.