Intrahousehold bargaining theory predicts that an income increase will cause an unambiguous increase in women's bargaining power. Identity theory, in contrast, predicts that women may voluntarily give up power to compensate their husbands whose identity is challenged by the increase in their wives' incomes. We outline a model of these competing forces. We then present empirical tests that use amendments to women's inheritance laws in India to identify variations in female income. We exploit differences across long-standing and deep-rooted social institutions (caste groups and the practice of purdah or veiling) for variation in identity prescriptions. Using a large dataset on married women, we estimate significant identity effects that lead to the loss of bargaining power of women after their income increase. The negative identity effects vary predictably with a household's stringency of patriarchal prescriptions regarding the "role" of women in a household. Consistent with identity theory, our results suggest that alterations in women's labor market activities are a plausible mechanism through which the loss of women's power is mediated and rule out alternative mechanisms, such as the potential rise in domestic violence that some scholars associate with increases in women's income.

This paper examines the effect of ownership structure on the distribution of household electricity costs and its implications for income inequality. We leverage data on household electricity expenditure, income, and utility tariff structures to provide new insights into the comparative merits of alternative ownership regimes in the U.S. electricity sector. We use ownership discontinuities between adjacent statistical areas to establish causal effects. We find strong evidence that electricity costs are more regressive under cooperative and public ownership, resulting in undesirable distributional outcomes. Households served by cooperative and publicly- owned utilities spend a larger share of their income on electricity than those served by private utilities. We present suggestive evidence that high fixed charges and limited segmentation of economically diverse consumer groups are potential mechanisms driving the observed regressivity of electricity costs. Our findings highlight the role of firms ownership structures and pricing strategies in shaping existing income inequality by determining how energy burdens are distributed across income groups.

In subsistence communities of Tanzania, we hypothesize that many small food transfers are made without the expectation of strict reciprocation, especially when these gifts are extended within close and extended family where altruistic feelings play a substantial role. Such transfers are often made to avoid direct financial transactions. We propose an extension of Alger and Weibull's model of bilateral mutual exchange, where siblings not only choose to exert effort in production, but can also choose to allocate their resources to particular uses (i.e., consumptive versus productive assets). To empirically investigate the crop production effort choice and the asset accumulation predicted by the theoretical model, we use primary data collected in 2012 from 550 households located in four rural Tanzanian villages. For each household, we document their weeding effort in cultivation and their investment in consumptive assets. We also record, for each of their giving and receiving instances, the kinship tie between the receiver and the giver. Consistent with the theory, we find that when gifting is performed between villagers with closer family ties, effort in cultivation tends to be lower. Similarly, when family gifting ties are stronger, villagers will invest more in consumptive assets (e.g., TVs, radios, couches). We then discuss the development implications of our findings.

Recent research at the intersection of psychology and economics sheds light on the influence of hope on economic decisions. A body of that work concentrates on the economics of hope in developing country contexts. We identify two notable gaps: lack of attention to the measurement of hope as a latent psychological construct, and consequently, the lack of description and characterization of hope as a variable that can be measured and targeted. This study addresses these gaps by assessing the effectiveness of a novel hope measurement instrument, utilizing a large primary dataset collected in rural Tanzania. We estimate hope distributions across over 5,000 individuals and conditionally within subgroups defined by gender, region, recent shock, age, food security, income source, and religiosity. A positively-worded question about faith had the greatest information content among all questions, negatively worded questions were more effective in distinguishing people with relatively high hope. Employing generalized structural equation models, we observe significant variations in hope across sub-groups. Correcting for measurement distortions, we find significant heterogeneity in hope distributions across individuals and subgroups. The presence of an income-earning household member and religiosity yield the most pronounced shifts in hope distributions.

We empirically study the role of assets held by women in the creation of household wealth using data from rural India. We design a streamlined model of intrahousehold project funding where moral hazard frictions between spouses and women's asset control are the main ingredients. As predicted by the model, the data show that household asset accumulation depends on women's asset control in a non-monotonic way. Results indicate no presence of multiple equilibrium poverty traps, but do show that exogenous negative shocks will trigger assets aggregation within households where both spouses are present. This resilience mechanism is, however, not found in female headed household as these households have a monotonic relationship between women's wealth control and asset creation. We thus argue that policies to support women's empowerment need to distinguish women based on their individual wealth levels and headship status to enhance household well-being in remote Indian communities.

Though gender dimensions are widely thought to influence adaptive activities of households (such as responses to climate change), there is little quantitative research, covering large scales, indicating the presence or magnitude of such impacts. We investigate adaptation in terms of changes in household farming practices of maize in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. While controlling for a number of household, site- and activity-specific characteristics, we investigate impacts of three types of gender variables on adaptation: roles, household headship and forecast information . Our measures of adaptation include counts of changed farming activities and probabilities of undertaking a given activity, with activity-specific controls for categories of types of adaptations. Results suggest that drivers of adaptation frequently depend on the specific category of activity being undertaken. Nonetheless, within this heterogeneous context, we find the following general results. For roles , relative to situations where both men and women are involved, some activities dominated by women and men alone are not prone to adaptation. For household headship , male-headed households are more prone to adaptation for some categories of activities, but specific roles of the non-head spouse may be an important consideration. For forecast information, providing information to only women does not affect adaptation, with more promising results if information is provided to both men and women. Overall, our results suggest the importance of understanding gendered relations within households and highlight potential problems with development programmes that just focus on women for promoting change.

Despite a large literature, empirical evidence on multiple-equilibria poverty traps remains elusive. Current empirical methods estimate average welfare-dynamics, which masks inherent heterogeneity across households. We develop an alternative approach that allows welfare-dynamics to differ across the household wealth distribution. Drawing on the literature on regression discontinuity designs, we propose a new statistical test for detecting multiple-equilibria and poverty traps. We demonstrate the approach using panel data on over 6000 rural households in India. Our application contributes to the economic development literature by examining poverty within caste, the main source of social stratification in India.

Intrahousehold models assume that plots farmed by women are as productive as plots farmed by men within the same household. Using a large plot-level dataset on rice farming households in India, we find evidence of significant Pareto inefficiency: women's plots produce lower yields compared to their spouse's plots, conditional on crop, plot and other attributes. The inefficiency is larger in the left tail of the rice yield distribution and primarily attributed to child-care burdens and social-norms faced by women.

Temporarily plugged or "suspended" wells pose environmental and economic risks due to the large volume of methane gas leaked. In the Canadian Province of Alberta, which, by far, has the largest number of petroleum wells in Canada, there are no regulations stipulating the maximum length of time a well can be left suspended. In recent years, an increasing number of wells have been put into the suspended state by owners. We show using a large data set obtained from the Alberta Energy Regulator that leak spells have increased between 1971 and 2019. For the same time period, the probability of an unresolved leak has also increased, and the amount of methane emitted per leak has substantially gone up. Lastly, we provide simple social-cost-of methane computations indicating that responsible policies can incentivize well owners towards remediation and reclamation and support efforts to fight climate change and improve upon economic expedience.

COVID-19 has wide-ranging and long-term implications for individual and household outcomes. Policymakers expect that the economic impact of COVID-19, channeled through labor markets, will disproportionately fall on women and girls, relative to men and boys. Surprisingly, little evidence exists for informing gender-sensitive COVID-19 recovery policies. This study examines the existence of gender-differentiated dynamic responses of labor market and other household welfare outcomes to GDP contractions using historical country level panel data for South/South-East Asia and West Africa. The econometric results reveal large gender differences in economic outcomes post crisis and provide insights for designing gender-sensitive COVID-19 recovery policies.

This paper presents an assessment of emerging livestock-based greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation schemes that link the uptake of environmentally beneficial breeding practices to carbon offset schemes. Using the example of genomic selection for feed efficiency by cattle producers in Alberta Canada, we explored the potential effect of spatial heterogeneity on producer incentive to participate in these schemes. We model three representative cow-calf operations in three agroecological zones and incorporate region specific breeding, economic and environmental factors. Our results show that environmental and economic outcomes differ spatially, and that the additional revenue from the existing offset scheme is inadequate to incentivize producers in specific regions. The priority for policy makers is to implement a differential payment scheme that accounts for specific sources of spatial heterogeneity in environmental and economic tradeoffs.

Finger millet (ragi) is increasingly recognized as a nutritious staple by Indian consumers and policy makers. Though previously regarded as a poor person’s crop, the benefits of enhanced ragi consumption may bypass the poor. Because home processing is arduous, small flour mills have been introduced to help. With geo-referenced survey data from a pilot area in the Kolli Hills region of Tamil Nadu, India, we examined determinants of mill use and use intensity employing a two stage multinomial selection model. Overall, we found that the mill technology was not pro-poor, in that poor people do not tend to use the mills more than wealthier people, or use them at higher rates. We identified the location of mills as being a key factor in preventing more use of mills by the poor. Therefore, to better serve the poor, external agencies would have to deliberately locate mills in poor communities. For this to be feasible, changes to make this technology work better with poor communities may be required, such as the use of less capital intensive technology such as hand- or pedal-power, rather than reliance on electrical power.

Using primary data from rural Peru and a novel econometric framework, this paper evaluates the effects of gendered land inheritance on women’s relative power. We find limited evidence that increasing a woman’s landholdings increases her power; while an increase in landholdings of men in her household decreases her power. A coincident increase in land for both has significant empowering effects. Thus, gender policies need to go beyond interventions that exclusively target women—empowering women also requires empowering men in specific ways. We also provide fresh insight into using women’s empowerment for economic development by distinguishing power from the influence that women possess over specific household decisions because of their power. We characterize each influence (e.g., household expenditures) by two statistics—threshold (the level of empowerment required to awaken the influence) and sensitivity (the response of the influence to marginal increases in power). We find that different thresholds of power are required for women to influence different household decisions. Credit and land-rental require much greater power and are less sensitive than livestock, household-goods, or management of agricultural land. Distinguishing power from influence adds great value to the survey questions now used to create indices of women’s power.

A large literature studies the mean gender wage gap in developing countries and finds mixed evidence about the role of education policies in closing gender earnings inequalities. We contribute to this literature by exploring two types of nonlinearities in wage earning regressions: (1) nonlinearities on the effects of education on expected earnings along the distribution of education endowments; and (2) heterogeneities on the contributions of education to the gender wage gap at different quantiles of the wage distribution. Our analyses provide new insights on how these nonlinear effects can be used to set up better targeted gender and development policies. ( JEL I26, C14)

We investigate the public preference heterogeneity of planting genetically improved poplar trees for biofuel production on public land in western Canada. Using a sample of the public from British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, respondents were asked to vote in a series of hypothetical referenda comparing the new, proposed forest policies with the current policy (base scenario). Proposed policies varied based on poplar breeding method (traditional, genomics, or genetic modification) and whether poplars may be used for biofuel production. A respondents' segmentation framework with cluster analysis and probit model was applied to data of respondents to uncover the heterogeneity of public's perception. The results of this study reveal that positive and negative perceptions about planting genetically improved poplar trees in the region create a division of respondents into Environmentalists, Knowledgeable, Challengers, and Supporters. Respondents from British Columbia and Manitoba are identified as Environmentalists and Challengers, respectively, of the new policy of planting genetically improved poplar trees on public land. Conversely, respondents from Saskatchewan and Alberta are identified as Supporters and Knowledgeable, respectively, of the new policy.

We examine the causal effect of income transfers on time allocations of household members into market work, domestic work and leisure, using primary data from rural South Africa. Female income decreases male leisure and increases male work, while men's income has opposite effects on women. Men's income is nurturing of women's time with salutary effects on both women's leisure and drudgery of domestic work. Adjustments in women's domestic work and leisure time remain missing links in the empirical literature on gender gaps. Our findings reveal significant gender-based asymmetries in income effects that are critical for development policy design. Copyright (C) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We investigate households' decisions regarding livelihood activities in response to future climate change in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. We use the contingent behavior method and account for unobserved heterogeneity in order to overcome problems associated with limited data, collinearity and endogeneity. We characterize the climate change with two types of climate change scenarios: dry-spells and wet-spells. Results show that moderate and extreme increases in dry-spells increase adoption of off-farm activities such as casual labor and small business, and decrease adoption of on-farm activities such as gardening. We find opposite cases for mild or moderate wet-spells. Our results also show that households tend to diversify their livelihood portfolios in response to a moderate increase in dry-spells and a mild increase in wet-spells. Some household characteristics are also important in influencing some types of activities, including household's health status, gender of the household head, and household's prior experience.

This paper proposes the application of hierarchical models to the assessment of feed efficiency in beef cattle. Using a large dataset comprising 5600 cattle assembled from different experimental studies, feed efficiency rankings of cattle were estimated using the proposed approach. This was compared to more commonly used linear, and nonlinear estimators. A phenotypic selection scheme that selects cattle at the means of different percentiles was developed to illustrate potential economic and environmental outcomes resulting from changes in feed efficiency rankings. The former involved the specification of a multi-year stochastic farm simulation model. In general, our results show that improved feed efficiency is associated with positive economic and environmental benefits. A unit reduction in feed intake (kg as fed/day) is associated with an average increase of $13.23 in net returns and 33.46 tonnes reduction in emission at the end of the feeding period. We also find that feed efficiency ranking of cattle is sensitive to estimation approach. The within percentile mean estimates of the hierarchical model were comparable to the conventional linear estimator. There were, however, deviations at the tails of feed efficiency distributions where selection is most likely to occur.

We examine the barriers to adoption of improved cook stoves (ICSs) in rural India, using a large, nationally representative dataset. We develop a collective household model to derive testable hypotheses about whether women’s intra-household influence, together with their relatively strong marginal preference for ICSs, affects adoption. Using a joint adoption-influence econometric model, we find compelling evidence that women’s influence over intra-household decisions significantly increases adoption. We further distinguish between alternative sources of women’s influence, and argue that our distinction has potential implications for ICS dissemination policies. We find that while there is significant variation in women’s influence across rural India due to cultural and other sociological factors, the effect of intra-household influence on adoption has a significant bargaining power component. Our results suggest that ICS programs may be able to increase adoption by marketing stoves in ways that empower women.

Women’s land rights are increasingly advocated as an empowerment tool to spur development outcomes. However, empirical evidence of this relationship is limited. In this study we use data from peasant communities in rural Peru to explore the effect of the intra-household allocation of inherited land on women’s empowerment. Empowerment is modeled as a latent variable measured by different influence indicators using a Generalized Structural Equation approach. We draw on Item Response Theory (IRT) to estimate difficulty and discrimination parameters which can inform policymakers about the impact of empowerment policies on women’s types of influences within their households. The empirical approach is consistent with empowerment’s latent and multidimensional nature and pays attention to endogeneity issues often present in other empirical studies. We find that although women’s land rights increase empowerment, the intra-household allocation of land determines the magnitude of this impact.