Research
Research
Working Papers
In many low-income settings, marriage requires women to relocate—often into patrilocal households, where they must integrate into their husband’s village network. How does this shift in network structure affect access to informal insurance? I study this in rural Malawi, where both patrilocal and matrilocal systems coexist. In a lab-in-the-field experiment, married women choose between risky and safer lotteries, and real network members decide whether to provide support after adverse outcomes. A signal framing these losses as rare events reduces support from weak ties, consistent with interpreting the outcome as the woman’s responsibility. The decline is almost twice as large for patrilocal women. Strong ties do not adjust support in either group. Informing women that network members would learn whether losses were idiosyncratic or widespread does not affect risk-taking. However, matrilocal women reduce risk when a network member can observe outcomes and provide support, suggesting stronger accountability pressures in tighter networks. These findings show how post-marital residence norms shape not only the structure of women’s networks, but also when and how informal insurance is activated.
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