Research

Abstract: Pineapple is a dynamic value chain in Benin that attracts investments from various stakeholders. Small-scale farmers produce the majority of the crop and most of them are men. Although women play an important role in agriculture overall and often manage their own fields, few of them cultivate pineapple on their fields. They face several specific, gender-related constraints preventing their involvement in this productive activity, including liquidity constraints, problems with the planification of activities over the course of the 18 months production cycle, bookkeeping or competing demands on their time. Exploratory field work reveals that husbands’ support is a crucial determinant of women’s success in this activity. A husband may offer financial support or help in monitoring workers for example. This raises the following questions: Is this support offering a (second-best) substitute for access to financial market or training or is it rather a complement (or a necessary condition) for a woman’s investment in this productive activity? What are the costs of seeking one husband’s help for one’s own business? Why are some husbands reluctant in offering this support? May this support be stimulated by an exogenous intervention? We investigate these questions taking advantage from an intervention set up by the Belgian Development Agency (Enabel) in order to encourage women involvement in pineapple production. It includes a business training and a generous subsidy for women to start or to expand a pineapple production. With a view to stimulate husbands’ support, in some groups, husbands have been invited to take part in the training and design, with their wife, an action plan for her pineapple production. 

Abstract: Bargaining power within the couple is often proxied in surveys by measures of who has a say in the decision -- with the idea that the more a couple discusses about choices to make, the more balanced is the bargaining power within the couple. However, arguing and discussing over a choice could also reflect non-aligned preferences among partners: with perfectly aligned preferences, who decides is not so important and delegation of the decision power becomes an efficient outcome.

We explore this pattern in a theoretical framework looking at the equilibrium decision structure in the household, analyzing how the degree of preference alignment and the differences in the opportunity costs of time determine when delegation or negociation is preferable. We consider a non-cooperative framework for intra-household decisions drawing from models of delegation of authority in firms developed by Dessein (2002) and Aghion and Tirole (1997). We test the predictions of the model in an online experiment conducted among couples.