Embedded Files
Post-conflict Land Restitution and Deforestation in Colombia, with Laura Peralta (U. Strasbourg, BETA), Philippe Delacote (INRAE, BETA), Kenneth Houngbedji (U.Paris Dauphine, DIAL, IRD), Julien Jacob (BETA, University of Strasbourg [R&R JEEM] Link to WP
We examine the environmental impacts of legal provisions to restore land rights for populations displaced by armed conflict, focusing on Colombia’s Land Restitution Law. Leveraging annual satellite data on forest cover loss, detailed records of the timing and location of restitution claims, and a staggered difference-in-differences strategy, we find that land restitution is associated with increased tree cover loss. Importantly, this effect is not driven by deforestation in primary forests, but rather by forest loss in areas formerly used for agriculture. These findings highlight the environmental trade-offs inherent in post-conflict land reforms. While restoring land rights is critical for transitional justice and economic recovery, attention to environmental outcomes is essential to ensure sustainable and equitable reconstruction.
Norms Behind Closed Doors: A Field Experiment on Gender Norm Misperceptions and Maternal Employment Decisions in Couples , with Monserrat Bustela (IADB), Ana Maria Diaz (U. Javeriana), and Agustina Suaya (IADB), 2026, [R&R EDCC]
We study whether pluralistic ignorance about societal and spousal support for maternal employment sustains gender gaps in labor outcomes. We first elicit secondorder beliefs from 1,732 cohabiting couples with young children in Bogotá. Personal support for working mothers is almost universal, yet both men and women substantially underestimate others’ support, particularly that of men. We then implement a randomized controlled trial delivering personalized information on prevailing attitudes toward maternal employment. The intervention narrowed belief gaps —raising women’s estimates of peer support and men’s perceptions of their partners’ views— while leaving first-order attitudes unchanged. Treated men were 7–8 percentage points (16 percent) more likely than men in the control group to nominate their wives for a career-building course rather than take the course for themselves; women, whose baseline demand was already high, showed no further change. Treated women intensified job-search efforts, and treated men expressed stronger preferences for work-family balance. These results reflect short-run adjustments in beliefs and reported behaviors, measured within weeks of the intervention.
Delegation in the Household: Theory and Experimental Evidence with Couples, with Jean-Marie Baland, (UNamur) Catherine Guirkinger (UNamur), Anna Jolivet (UNamur), and Roberta Ziparo (AMSE), 2026 link to WP, [Submitted]
Non-participation in household decisions is commonly interpreted as weak empowerment. We challenge this interpretation by showing that non-participation can be a strategic choice — a form of delegation — when a spouse expects the decision outcome to be sufficiently close to her preferences regardless of her involvement. We propose a model of imperfect information and derive conditions under which delegation arises in equilibrium: it occurs when the opportunity cost of participation in the decision is large compared to the preference gap between spouses. A key implication is that the spouse who receives authority may achieve lower welfare than the one who delegates. We test these predictions in two incentivized experiments conducted among couples in Belgium/France and Benin, finding strong support across both contexts. Survey evidence further confirms the external validity of the results. Our findings suggest that standard survey measures of intra-household bargaining, by conflating strategic delegation with disempowerment, may incorrectly reflect the distribution of power within households.
Gender norms, couples’ labor supply decisions, and flexibility in working conditions in Colombia, with Luz Magdalena Salas (U. Javeriana) and Ana Maria Diaz (U. Javeriana), 2026
Who within a household pays the wage cost of workplace flexibility, and why are women the ones who pay? We study these questions with a within-couple discrete choice experiment with 410 cohabiting heterosexual couples in low-income neighborhoods of Bogota, in which each spouse separately values a hybrid version of both their own job and their partner's job under randomized wage discounts. Wives forgo 16.6 percent of their reservation wage for a hybrid version of their own job, while husbands forgo only 4.2 percent for theirs. The ordering reverses when each spouse chooses for the partner: husbands assign 21.8 percent of the wife's wage to her hybrid work, while wives assign just 3.9 percent to his. The same respondent places a far higher value on flexibility for the wife's job than on flexibility for the husband's, and the husband's preferred allocation of flexibility to his wife's job is uncorrelated with her own preferred allocation. We test ten candidate channels behind this asymmetry. The pattern is most consistent with a gender norm assigning flexibility to the wife's job because she is the appropriate bearer of flexible work, consistent with an intergenerational component, and amplified when the husband's earnings are the household's anchor.
Trading Off Autonomy: How Girls and Parents Weight Education, Work, and Marriage? Evidence from a Discrete Choice Experiment in Senegal , with Frieda Vandeninden, Joseph Djafon, Mathieu Lefèbvre,
Field work in May 2025, work in progress
Sharing the Burden or the Burden of Sharing? Intra-Family Redistribution and Personal Savings in Senegal
Social solidarity, especially within the extended family, plays a preponderant role in the context of absent efficient financial markets and low formal public redistribution. This informal redistribution may however induce distortions in resource allocation and accumulation decisions. The present paper investigates the effect of this informal redistribution within the extended family on savings decisions over the life cycle, relying on a rich nationally representative household survey collected in 2006 in Senegal. The intensity of the sharing pressure is captured on the one hand, by the exogenous number of siblings and on the other hand, by the position held among siblings, as measured by the birth rank. Over the life cycle, I find some evidence of delayed reciprocity for firstborn siblings from their younger siblings. For women, this pattern is driven by transfers for ceremonies. Firstborn men achieve lower savings stock even later in life while firstborn women hold more savings the more co-resident sisters they have, but only in savings held outside the household. This is suggestive of a strategic behavior to restrain redistributive obligations.
Sokoura, Mali
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