American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Spousal Control and Intra-household Decision Making: An Experimental Study in the Philippines
American Economic Review
vol. 99,
no. 4, September 2009
(pp. 1245–77)
Abstract
I elicit causal effects of spousal observability and communication on financial choices of married individuals in the Philippines. When choices are private, men put money into their personal accounts. When choices are observable, men commit money to consumption for their own benefit. When required to communicate, men put money into their wives' account. These strong treatment effects on men, but not women, appear related more to control than to gender: men whose wives control household savings respond more strongly to the treatment and women whose husbands control savings exhibit the same response. Changes in information and communication interact with underlying control to produce mutable gender-specific outcomes. (JEL D13, D14, J12, J16, O15)Citation
Ashraf, Nava. 2009. "Spousal Control and Intra-household Decision Making: An Experimental Study in the Philippines." American Economic Review, 99 (4): 1245–77. DOI: 10.1257/aer.99.4.1245Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D13 Household Production and Intrahousehold Allocation
- D14 Personal Finance
- J12 Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure; Domestic Abuse
- J16 Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
- O15 Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration