We examine how women’s bargaining power affects child nutritional status using data from rural
Senegal. In order to correct for the potential endogeneity of women’s empowerment we use
information on a mother’s ethnicity relative to that of the community she resides in to construct
an arguably exogenous instrument. While standard OLS suggests that if a mother has more
bargaining power, her children will have a better nutritional status, our IV estimates indicate that
the true impact is underestimated if the endogeneity of bargaining power is not taken into
account.