Measuring and Changing Control: Women's Empowerment and Targeted Transfers

By Ingeborg Korme

11 July 2018 08:00

Measuring and Changing Control: Women's Empowerment and Targeted Transfers

New published paper in The Economic Journal by Ingvild Almås, Alex Armand (University of Navarra), Orazio Attanasio (University College London) and Pedro Carneiro (University College London): "Measuring and Changing Control: Women's Empowerment and Targeted Transfers".

Abstract

This article uses a novel identification strategy to measure power in the household. Our strategy is to elicit women's willingness to pay to receive a cash transfer instead of their spouse receiving it. We selected participants from a sample of women who had already participated in a policy intervention in Macedonia offering poor households cash transfers conditional on having their children attending secondary school. The programme randomised transfers at the municipality level to either household heads (generally a male) or mothers. We show that women who were offered the transfer on average have stronger measured empowerment. Here, IV estimation confirms this result.

Read the paper in The Economic Journal

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