Gender, Household Bargaining, and Information
Paper Session
Monday, Jan. 4, 2021 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM (EST)
- Chair: Arthur Lewbel, Boston College
Inefficient Collective Households: Cooperation and Consumption
Abstract
We propose a model of consumption inefficiency in collective households. Inefficiency depends on a "cooperation factor", which can also affect both the allocation of resources within a household and the utility of household members. Households are conditionally efficient, conditioning on the value of the cooperation factor. This lets us exploit convenient modeling features of efficient households (like not needing to specify the bargaining process), while still accounting for---and measuring the dollar cost of---inefficiency. In data from Bangladesh, we find more cooperation is equivalent to a 13% gain in expenditures, with most of the benefit going towards men.Income Changes and Intimate Partner Violence: Theory and Evidence from Unconditional Cash Transfers in Kenya
Abstract
In a previous study, we found an improvement in female empowerment after randomized unconditional cash transfers in Kenya (Haushofer and Shapiro 2016). Here we report detailed impacts of these transfers on physical and sexual intimate partner violence, and construct a theory to explain them. Transfers to women averaging USD 709 reduced physical and sexual violence (−0.26, −0.22 standard deviations). Transfers to men reduced physical violence (−0.18 SD). We find spillovers: physical violence towards non-recipient women in treatment villages decreased (−0.16 SD). We show theoretically that transfers to both men and women are needed to understand why violence occurs. Our theory suggests that husbands use physical violence to extract resources, but dislike it, while sexual violence is not used to extract resources, but is pleasurable.Learning in the Household
Abstract
This paper studies whether different members of a household are able to efficiently share and aggregate information to make better decisions. We recruit 400 married couples in Chennai, India, for a lab experiment in which they play a simple information aggregation game. Spouses are asked to discuss and guess the fraction of colored balls in an urn after each spouse privately makes several draws from the urn. We find that husbands put substantially less weight on relevant information that was collected by their wife, relative to their `own' information. Wives do not display this behavior. In a follow-up experiment with pairs of opposite-gender strangers, both genders exhibit this bias for their own information. This bias appears to explain why joint decision-making is no better than individual choices, when holding the information structure and content constant.‘Til Dowry Do Us Part: Bargaining and Violence in Indian Families
Abstract
Dowries are wealth transfers from the bride’s family at the time of marriage. In India, such transfers are widespread, sizable, and often associated with extreme forms of gender inequality. To better understand this issue, we develop a non-cooperative bargaining model with incomplete information linking dowry payments, domestic violence, and the allocation of marital gains between a husband and a wife. Our model generates several predictions, which we test empirically using amendments to the Indian anti- dowry law as a natural experiment. We first confirm that the increased punishments introduced by the amendments decreased dowry transfers considerably. In line with the model predictions, we then document a sharp decline in women’s decision power and a dramatic surge in domestic violence following the reforms. These unintended consequences are attenuated when social stigma against separation is low and, in some circumstances, when gains from marriage are high. Whenever possible, parents increase their investment in the human capital of their daughters to compensate for lower dowries.JEL Classifications
- D1 - Household Behavior and Family Economics
- O1 - Economic Development