Field Experiment to elicit Intra-Household Bargaining Power
Abstract
Arnab Basu
PhD en Economía. The Johns Hopkins University.
Profesor en Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University.
Abstract: : Bargaining power of a spouse within the household is highly correlated with a spouse’s individual characteristics like education, labor market participation, fertility, monetary / non-monetary transfers at the time of marriage and health, amongst other factors. One way to address this endogeneity is to exploit unanticipated income shocks (windfall income gains to either the husband or the wife) to determine how the extra income is used, and therefore which spouse has more bargaining power. Absent income shocks, field experiments offer an alternative method of observing bargaining power by letting husbands and wives decide about the allocation of a pre-determined endowment within a controlled environment independently of each other. In this talk, I will focus on the design of a novel intra-household bargaining power experiment that mimics real world decision-making by featuring both non-cooperative and cooperative decision-making aspects. As an example, I will relate the measure of mother’s bargaining power to children’s educational outcomes using data from rural Cote d’ Ivoire. I will also discuss an experiment to elicit risk preferences to check whether mother’s risk preferences and bargaining power complement each other in the determination of educational outcomes for children