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In low-income communities, pressure to share income with others may disincentivize work, distorting labor supply. This paper documents that across countries, social groups that undertake more interpersonal transfers work fewer hours. Using a field experiment, the study enabled piece-rate factory workers in Côte d'Ivoire to shield income using blocked savings accounts over 3-9 months. Workers could only deposit earnings increases, relative to baseline, mitigating income effects on labor supply. The study varied whether the offered account was private or known to the worker's network, altering the likelihood of transfer requests against saved income. When accounts were private, take-up was substantively higher (60% vs. 14%). Offering private accounts sharply increased labor supply—raising work attendance by 10% and earnings by 11%. Outgoing transfers did not decline, indicating no loss in redistribution. The estimates imply a 9–14% social tax rate. The welfare benefits of informal redistribution may come at a cost, depressing labor supply and productivity.

Low levels of agricultural productivity and investment hinder economic growth in developing countries. This paper presents results from a field experiment in Côte d'Ivoire, which randomized wives’ participation in an agricultural extension training for rubber, a male-dominated export crop that takes six years to start producing latex but requires upfront care. The training included a planning portion, consisting of filling out an action plan for rubber farming over the next two years, and a skills portion. In the without-wife group, households witnessed a 26.4 percent drop in the value of the crop harvested and a 18.4 percent drop in productivity, with labor going to planting rubber seedlings. In the group with wife participation, households had higher levels of investment (planting 20 percent more rubber seedlings) and were able to maintain pre-program levels of agricultural production on older trees and other crops. These households increased their labor hours and agricultural input use, resulting in no drop in overall production or productivity. This outcome did not come through increased skills or incentives. Rather, underlying these results are increases in planned agricultural management by wives, increased retention of the action plan, and a reduction in gendered task division. The results show how including women in economic planning can improve the efficiency of household farm production and promote higher levels of investment.

Across a wide variety of regions and contexts, surveys have found high rates of disagreement within couples on matters of household decision making. Using a unique data set from a spousal survey of 421 agricultural households in the Philippines, this paper finds that 50.2 percent of couples disagree about who makes any given decision in the household. The paper systematically explores the empirical relevance of theoretical explanations from the existing literature for this spousal disagreement. Spouses are no more likely to agree on specific decisions compared with general decision making, are more likely to agree on the decision-making process, and are less likely to agree on decision making for activities in which both take part. Moreover, women are more likely to report that their husbands were involved in decision making when speaking with a female enumerator. The findings suggest that intrahousehold disagreement is not driven by differing interpretations of which decisions count as “major,” or by asymmetric information. Although the paper finds evidence of enumerator effects, their magnitude is small and cannot explain the observed rates of spousal disagreement over decision making. Rather, spousal disagreement appears to stem primarily from systematic gender differences in interpreting what it means to be a decision maker. The paper discusses the implications of the findings for the measurement of intrahousehold decision making in household surveys.

Session ID 4596, Paper# 19849

This paper investigates whether the relative self-esteem level of spouses can lead to within- household competition for inputs and affect economic gender inequality in the home. Using data on smallholder farmer couples in Cote d'Ivoire, the paper examines the relationship between spouses' self-esteem and income-earning in agriculture. Although the link between own self-esteem and crop income earning is positive, there is a "battle of the sexes" in which one spouse's self-esteem is negatively related to the other's income earning, particularly income earning in higher-value, export-oriented agriculture. Women's outcomes are more sensitive to their own self-esteem (positively) and to their partners' (negatively) than men's. This negative relationship is driven by individuals during middle age, when self-esteem is considered most stable. A key channel through which self-esteem appears to matter is by increasing control over household land, which is a scarce but crucial input to agricultural production. In addition to confirming the importance of noncognitive skills for poverty reduction in rural settings, the findings highlight the importance of their impact on intra- and inter-household inequality, especially in the presence of interlocking market failures constraining the supply of inputs to production.

Improving women’s agency, namely their ability to define goals and act on them, is crucial for advancing gender equality and the empowerment of women. Yet, existing frameworks for measuring women’s agency – both disorganized and partial – provide a fragmented understanding of the constraints women face in exercising their agency, thus restricting the design of reliable and valid interventions and evaluation of their impact. This paper proposes a multidisciplinary framework for capturing individual agency, containing three critical dimensions: goal setting, perceived control and ability to initiate action toward goals (“sense of agency”), and acting on goals. For each dimension, the paper reviews existing measurement approaches and what is known about their relative quality. The study concludes by highlighting that future research to improve the measurement of women’s agency should prioritize incorporating different contexts, age groups, and decision-making areas to ensure programming and policies are meaningful to the lives of women.

Our detailed survey of farming households in the rural Philippines reveals widespread and systemic spousal disagreement on decision-making, a phenomenon reflected in similar surveys throughout the world. Using original qualitative and quantitative data, we explore the following research questions: first, what are the drivers of disagreement in spousal reports of decision-making? Second, we explore the empowerment angle by asking what is the relationship between decision-making and empowerment? The measurement of women’s empowerment in agriculture and the household has traditionally used women’s self-reported participation in decision-making as an indicator of household power, and joint decision-making is often used as a targeted outcome in development efforts. However, spousal surveys across a variety of contexts have revealed high levels of disagreement between spouses about decision-making authority. Although women’s decision-making power has been associated in some studies with better household outcomes, the conceptual and evidential links between decision-making and empowerment have been called into question. Our work adds to the literature on the measurement of decision-making and disagreement, and on the links between decision-making power and empowerment writ large. Our quantitative analysis uses data from a spousal survey of agricultural households in the rural Philippines, primarily on the island of Mindanao. Part of a larger study on land tenure, respondents were asked about decisions in a variety of agricultural domains, as well as household matters. We capture respondents’ agency through the locus of control and Relative Autonomy Index (RAI) scales. Qualitative data come from a follow-up round of semi-structured interviews focusing on the decision-making process. We exploit the detailed decision-making questionnaire to test for different drivers of decision-making, namely differing interpretations of decision-making, differing frames of reference, and social desirability bias. To test for the relationship between decision-making and empowerment, we regress various aspects of decision-making power on the respondents’ motivational autonomy. Our follow-on qualitative interviews provide more detail on differing interpretations of decision-making, and the social norms regarding decision-making in our sample population. We find evidence that differing gendered interpretations of what it means to be a decision maker are a driver of spousal disagreement on decision-making, with women more likely to report themselves as joint decision-makers as long as they are included in a conversation. Qualitative work suggests a strong social norm towards a consultative decision-making process, further obscuring the differences between interpretations of sole and joint decision-making and increasing measurement error. We also find limited evidence of social desirability bias as a driver of measurement error. We find the being a decision-maker is not associated with higher overall autonomy. However, the ability to make one’s own personal decisions, and the level of input on decisions, are well-correlated with motivational autonomy. Our findings indicate that simple binary outcomes of sole and joint decision-making obscure important elements of the decision process, suggesting the need for a more nuanced and context-specific measurement of process and intent if it is to be used as an indicator or outcome.

This paper analyzes changes in agricultural productivity gender gaps in Côte d'Ivoire between 2008 and 2016 using decomposition methods. The analysis finds that the unconditional gender gap between male- and female-headed households has decreased by 14 percent over the past decade. The conditional gender gap has decreased by 32 percent and becomes statistically insignificant once accounting for whether households farm export crops. This transition is driven by improvements across crop types, but it is particularly remarkable for export crop productivity, likely due to increased adoption of fertilizer and pesticide by female-headed households. Despite these substantial improvements, female-headed households in the bottom half of the distribution remain disadvantaged. Moreover, over the past decade, female-headed households did not transition into commercial agriculture and have witnessed greater reductions in land area compared with their male counterparts. The results show that helping these female-headed households access agricultural labor, strengthen their land rights, and adopt export crops are the three most promising policy options to reach gender parity in agriculture in Côte d'Ivoire.

Gender disparities in small and medium-size enterprise lending exist around the world and impede the growth of millions of women-led firms. This paper examines a potential driver of these disparities: gender-biased loan officers. Officer bias is measured through a novel loan application experiment conducted with 77 loan officers in Turkish banks. The analysis finds that 35 percent of the loan officers are biased against female applicants, with women receiving loan amounts $14,000 lower on average compared with men. Experience in the banking sector can attenuate this bias, with each year of experience reducing gender biased loan allocations by 6 percent. The results suggest that loan officers may use gender bias as a heuristic device given limited information and risk aversion. Helping newly recruited and lesser experienced loan officers to better discern loan application quality may thus improve financing of business loans to women and reduce gender gaps in entrepreneurship.

This paper examines women's power relative to that of their husbands in 23 Sub-Saharan African countries to determine how it affects women's health, reproductive outcomes, children's health, and children's education. The analysis uses a novel measure of women's empowerment that is closely linked to classical theories of power, built from spouses' often-conflicting reports of intrahousehold decision making. It finds that women's power substantially matters for health and various family and reproductive outcomes. Women taking power is also better for children's outcomes, in particular for girls' health, but it is worse for emotional violence. The results show the conceptual and analytical value of intrahousehold contention over decision making and expand the breadth of evidence on the importance of women's power for economic development.

This paper documents novel evidence of positive assortative matching in African marriage markets along cognitive and socio-emotional skills, time and risk preferences, and education, using data from rural Mozambique, Cote d'Ivoire, and Malawi.

Women farmers in the Western Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) bear the disproportionate burden of unpaid care work. Women spend less time than men on their plots and more time on domestic work. The authors use a combination of consultations in the field, desk research, and primary data collection to understand the patterns of time allocation in rural households in Western DRC. The gender differences in time allocation are striking where the female plot managers do 1 hour and 52 minutes more of domestic work per day than male plot managers. The gender differences are higher in male-headed households, and female plot managers spend significantly more time taking care of children when farming or going to market than their male counterparts. The agricultural productivity of female plot managers is on average twenty six percent lower than that of male plot managers. Having young children is associated with lower productivity for women but not for men. With the support of various stakeholders, the authors will pilot the provision of childcare services in the targeted region. The authors will rigorously evaluate the importance of these services on women’s time allocation to productive activities, as well as their productivity.

Improving women's agency, namely their ability to define goals and act on them, is crucial for advancing gender equality and the empowerment of women. Yet, existing frameworks for women's agency measurement -- both disorganized and partial -- provide a fragmented understanding of the constraints women face in exercising their agency, restricting the design of quality interventions and evaluation of their impact. This paper proposes a multidisciplinary framework containing the three critical dimensions of agency: goal-setting, perceived control and ability ("sense of agency"), and acting on goals. For each dimension, the paper (i) reviews existing measurement approaches and what is known about their relative quality; (ii) presents new empirical evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa: validating vignettes as a measurement tool for goal-setting, examining gender and regional discrepancies in response to sense-of-agency measures, and investigating what information spousal disagreement over decision-making roles can provide about the intra-household process of acting on goals; and (iii) highlights priorities for future research to improve the measurement of women’s agency.