Working Papers
“Spousal Decision-Making and Women's Employment”. Pre-Analysis plan available here. Job Market Paper; Draft available soon
Abstract: Across the world, women remain substantially less likely than men to participate in the labor force. For married women, employment decisions are often made within the couple rather than individually, yet little is known about whether and how husbands' and wives' preferences over jobs differ or how these preferences translate into joint decisions. To investigate this, I conduct a survey experiment with 1,021 married couples in peri-urban India, where all sampled wives are out of the labor force. Husbands and wives separately evaluate the same hypothetical job offers for the wife, with experimentally varied characteristics designed to relax previously identified constraints to female employment. Couples then evaluate the same offers jointly, allowing me to compare individual preferences with joint decisions. I document four main findings. First, husbands' willingness to accept employment opportunities for their wives is low for jobs that do not alleviate salient constraints, but increases substantially when constraints are relaxed. Second, husbands and wives value most job characteristics similarly on average, although husbands place significantly greater value on female-only workplaces. Third, disagreement is widespread: spouses disagree on 36 percent of job offers, with disagreement occurring in both directions. Fourth, joint decisions disproportionately favor rejection when spouses disagree, regardless of which spouse opposes the job. However, relaxing constraints reduce the likelihood that disagreement ends in rejection.
“Community-Based Solutions to Overcome Collective Action Problems: An Experiment in Rural Vietnam” with Thong Ho (Ho Chi Minh City University of Economics), Dung Le (Wageningen University), Nguyen Thi Phuong Linh (National Economics University), Joseph Vecci (Gothenburg University). Pre-Analysis plan available here. Draft available soon
Work in Progress
"Information and Husbands’ Support for Women’s Employment"