Research
Research
Working Papers
In many low-income settings, marriage requires women to relocate, often into their husband’s village. How does this institutional shift in network structure affect access to informal insurance? I study this question in rural Malawi, where patrilocal and matrilocal residence systems coexist. In a lab-in-the-field experiment, married women choose between risky and safer lotteries, and real members of their social networks decide whether to provide financial support following adverse outcomes. I experimentally vary information about the rarity of losses to examine how network members interpret economic shocks. When losses are rare, support from weak ties declines, consistent with inferences of personal responsibility. This decline is nearly twice as large for patrilocal women. In contrast, strong ties maintain support across information conditions. Experimental patterns mirror self-reported borrowing and social criticism following real shocks. The results show that post-marital residence shapes not only network composition, but also how networks interpret and insure economic risk.
Can questions about life satisfaction be used to measure parental preferences for daughters versus sons? Daughter preference has rarely been documented in the literature, even in matrilineal settings. One possible reason is that the commonly used measures of parental gender preference, such as fertility-stopping rules and sex ratio at birth, are ill-suited to high-fertility settings. We instead assess maternal preferences in Malawi by examining the life satisfaction of women who currently have one child, comparing those with a daughter to those with a son. We find that in matrilineal households, having a daughter increases mothers’ life satisfaction, relative to having a son. In contrast, women in patrilineal households do not exhibit significant gender preferences.
This paper examines how gendered income shocks shape household consumption in rural Mali. I exploit rainfall variation across male- and female-managed crops to construct plausibly exogenous, gender-specific shocks. Using nationally representative household survey data, I find that shocks to women’s crops shift spending toward food, while shocks to men’s crops affect non-food expenditures. These results are consistent with separate accounts within households and highlight how gendered exposure to risk influences the allocation of resources. The findings contribute to debates on intra-household allocation, the consequences of weather shocks, and the role of gender in shaping household resilience.
Work in Progress