My Research

Tipples and Quarrels in the Household: The Effect of an Alcohol Mitigation Intervention on Intimate Partner Violence (with Fatima Aqeel and David Murphy) 

submitted

Alcohol abuse and intimate partner violence (IPV) coexist in many households. We estimate the causal effect of a randomized-control trial designed to mitigate alcohol consumption on IPV in Western Kenya, where IPV rates are higher than the global and national average. Treatment was randomly assigned at the village level and consisted of treated households attending a three-day workshop and couples’ counseling sessions.   Non-treated households in close proximity could benefit from treatment spillovers, and were part of a spillover control group consisting of randomly chosen households within the treated villages. Pure control households were located in different, nearby villages. We collected data 2 months (short-run) and 16 months (medium-run) after the intervention. Two months after the intervention, the prevalence of sexual IPV and frequency of physical violence significantly decreased. Interestingly, men were also 11 percentage points less likely to agree that wife-beating is justified when a wife refuses sex. However, we find no effect of the intervention on sexual violence, physical violence, or IPV attitudes 16 months later. Instead, we find a significant reduction of emotional IPV in the medium run. We show that our short-run results were caused by our intervention instead of counselor monitoring or demand effects.

Intra-Household Allocation, Beliefs, and Communication between Spouses in Kenya (with Yuta Masuda and Wei Zhang)

 [submitted]

Spousal experiments continue to report non-cooperative behavior, raising questions about potential interventions to increase intra-household efficiency. We examine the effect of facilitating communication between spouses. We conducted a field-laboratory experiment in Kenya where individuals in established marriages were asked to play several rounds of a trust game. In half of the rounds, spouses were allowed to communicate. We find evidence to reject both the unitary and cooperative models of the household as senders transfer on average 62% of their endowments resulting in an average loss of earnings of Ksh 175, even when spouses are allowed to discuss allocations. Communication improve efficiency by 4 percentage points. We elicit beliefs about what spouses expect their partners to choose and find that individuals in couples with concordant beliefs make less efficient choices. We explore how the experimental results relate to conflicting responses between spouses over intra-household transfers, marital satisfaction, and trust.

What’s the Plan Now? The Effect of the Dobbs Decision on Planned Parenthood Clinic Closures and Abortion and Family Services Provision (with Vuong Hoang, Colgate Graduate and PhD student at UT Austin Policy School)

submitted

On June 24th, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and all federal protection for abortion. The Dobbs Decision radically changed the landscape of reproductive health in America. Using a differences-in-differences analysis, we estimate the effect of the Dobbs Decision on closures of Planned Parenthood clinics and the proportion of these clinics that continue to provide abortion services. The results show that the Dobbs Decision reduced the proportion of clinics that offer abortions, even though there is a positive effect on the number of clinics open. Our results are robust to different definitions of assignment to treatment.

Women Talking: Intimate Partner Violence, Group Discussions, and their Effects on Social and Economic Ties (with David Murphy and Fatima Aqeel)

This study analyzes the results of a substance abuse intervention, which included group workshops and individual and spousal counseling sessions, on relationships between female peers. Using dyadic estimations, we find evidence that exogenous formation/strengthening of ties in the village community through this intervention led to significant and positive economic and social outcomes between women sixteen months post-intervention. The results are especially strong among those with differential exposure to IPV at baseline, suggesting increased aid and support given to vulnerable women. For example, among female peers assigned to the treatment in which female i had a high likelihood of exposure to IPV at baseline but female j did not, we find the peers are 9 percentage points (pp) more likely to speak recently about domestic violence, 7 pp more likely to have received money from their peer, 18 pp more likely to attend the same organization with each other, and 15 pp more likely to speak to each other daily. These results support reports of continued meetings among women who participated in the intervention. The study contributes to our understanding of methods to improve economic and social outcomes among those who have experienced IPV.

The value of daughters: Evidence from the Save Girls Educate Girls program in India (with Kritika Sen Chakraborty) 

The disproportionately higher number of boys born per girl in Asian countries like India reflects cultural preferences for sons and gender disparities in human capital investments. We examine the impact of a government-led campaign focused on the survival and education of girls on adult fertility preferences and human capital outcomes of children in India. We leverage a fuzzy regression discontinuity design that exploits the low child sex ratio as the criterion for the implementation of the program in select states. Our results indicate that the program decreases the ideal number of boys and girls desired by women. However, women exposed to the program are likely to value girls more as indicated by the higher ratio of ideal girls to boys, with stronger effects among women with firstborn sons and those belonging to poorer households. We also find an increase in the likelihood of school attendance of children and adolescents, particularly girls. Our results suggest that norm-changing interventions can enhance the intrinsic value of the girl child, especially in regions characterized by skewed sex ratios.

Gender Roles and Asymmetric Information: Non-cooperative Behavior on Intra-Household Allocation (with Thomas Walker) 

Featured in the Gender Action Portal at the Harvard Kennedy School. [Link]

We present a model of intra-household bargaining under asymmetric information in rural Ghana, a context in which men and women hold separate economies and husbands make regular transfers to their wives to pay for household expenses. The model predicts that spouses have an incentive to hide unobservable windfalls from each other when the windfall is small relative to the transfer, and that this incentive may differ by gender. We test these hypotheses using data from a field experiment in Ghana, in which husbands and wives in four small communities both had an independent chance to win lottery prizes of cash and livestock. Half of the prizes were awarded publicly, the other half privately. In line with the model’s predictions, the effect of prize-winning on expenditure varies significantly depending on the publicity of the prize and the gender of the winning spouse. We also find evidence that the information asymmetry has an effect on intertemporal allocations of the prize-winnings. Our findings imply that in a marital setting, the publicity of windfalls may matter as much or more than the gender of the recipient, and that provision of formal savings mechanisms may strengthen wives’ ability to control unanticipated income.

Permanent Working Papers:

Heteroskedasticity in Fixed-Effects One-way Error Components Models: Evaluating the Performance of Standard Tests 

This paper evaluates the performance of the Breusch-Pagan LM test and the White test for heteroskedasticity in fixed-effects one-way error components models. I contrast the results of these tests for the fixed-effects and the first differences model, which differ on the severity of serial correlation. Monte Carlo results indicate both tests perform equally well in large samples, but they are very sensitive to overall sample size, as changes in T or N do not affect the performance if overall sample size is held constant.

Show me the Money: Intra-Household Allocation under Incomplete Information 

There is evidence that individuals will sometimes withhold income transfers, such as bonuses, gifts, and cash transfers, from other members of the household (Ashraf (2009); Vogley and Pahl (1994)). In this paper, I show that the incentives to hide income under incomplete information over the quantity of resources available to the household differ for three different household resource management structures. I illustrate this with a simple two-stage game. In the first stage, one spouse receives a monetary transfer that is unobserved by her spouse, and she must decide whether to reveal or to hide it. In the second stage, spouses bargain over the allocation of resources between a household good and private expenditure. The three models differ in the resource allocation mechanism that takes place in second stage of the game: housekeeping allowance, independent management, and joint management. Results indicate that hiding is more likely to occur in households with a housekeeping allowance contract, compared to independent or joint management. However if the spouse with the information advantage has low bargaining power, hiding is even more likely to occur relative to non-cooperative contracts. [Previously circulated as: "Intra-Household Resource Management Structure and Income-Hiding under Incomplete Information"]. 

Ties that Bind: The Kin System as a Mechanism for Income-Hiding in Rural Ghana 

UNU-WIDER Working Paper WP/2013/007

I present a simple model of intra-household allocation between spouses to show that when the quantity of resources available to the household is not perfectly observed by both spouses, hiding of income can occur even when revelation of the additional resources increases bargaining power. From the model, a test to identify income hiding empirically is derived. A household survey conducted in 4 districts in Southern Ghana is used to determine whether the information asymmetries that exist between spouses over farm income result in hiding. The data contains information on cross-reporting of each spouse’s farm income. I exploit the variation in the differences in reporting of the husband’s own farm income and his wife’s report as an indicator of information asymmetries over farm income, to test whether the allocation of resources in Ghanaian households is consistent with income-hiding. In order to identify the effect of asymmetric information over farm income the wife’s clan and the husband’s bride-wealth payments upon marriage are used as instruments for asymmetric information. My findings indicate that men hide farm sales income in the form of gifts to family members other than children and their spouse, which are not closely monitored. In doing so, men give up bargaining power as there is a reduction in observable expenditures such as public transportation. The wife’s response is also consistent with hiding. As information asymmetries increase, she reduces her expenditure in non-essential items, such as prepared foods and oil, but increases personal spending as a result of the gain in bargaining power. [Previously circulated as: "What's Yours is Ours, and What's Mine is Mine? Identifying Income-Hiding between Spouses in Rural Ghana"]. 

Work in Progress:

Agency and Intra-HH Efficiency: Field experiment on the effect of Alcohol Mitigation in Kenya (with David Murphy and Tarana Chauhan)

Effect of an Alcohol Mitigation Intervention on Time Preferences in Kenya (with David Murphy)

Kitchen Garden and Nutritional Security: Evidence from rural India (with Chitwan Lalji, Deb Pakrashi, Andaleeb Rahman, and Sounak Thakur)

The Effect of Kitchen Gardens on Women's Agency and Intra-Household Efficiency (with Chitwan Lalji, Deb Pakrashi, Andaleeb Rahman, and Sounak Thakur)

The Effect of Kitchen Gardens on Women's Time Use (with Chitwan Lalji, Deb Pakrashi, Andaleeb Rahman, and Sounak Thakur)

Housework, Horizontal Segregation, and Gender Productivity Gaps in Nigeria (with Beza Bahru and Hongdi Zhao)

Intergenerational Transmission of Intimate Partner Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa (with Lindsay Novak)

Team Work and Cooperative Behavior (with Takao Kato)