Although new agricultural technologies are widely expected to enhance the productivity of rural households, evidence on how households reallocate resources to capitalize on these innovations is limited. To explore how households respond to a profitable, but risky new technology, I conduct a framed field experiment played with maize growing couples that simulates the exchange of labor and income in Mozambican households. When presented with a familiar local maize variety that is relatively insensitive to the wifes' labor input, households allocate labor to husbands' maize production fairly efficiently. But when faced with an improved maize variety whose higher returns would induce cooperative households to increase maize labor, couples forego 21% of expected cooperative income. Analysis of husbands' income sharing rules reveals that wives stood to gain just 17% in expected income had they increased their labor as predicted, and in exchange for a 34 percentage point increase in their probability of coming away from the game with no income. These results suggest that stickiness in intra-household income sharing may dampen the reallocation of productive resources in households that adopt profitable new technologies. Novel empirical evidence on real life intra-household income sharing from sample communities corroborates key findings from the game. 

Traditional marketing of agricultural insurance has often focused on the protection of male interests through capital preservation, but insurance can also mitigate consumption risks often borne specifically by women. We study whether a randomized information treatment that emphasizes the potential for index insurance indemnity payments to help smooth household consumption for which women are responsible increases (i) the adoption of agricultural index insurance, and (ii) wives' labor to the insured crop through a reduction in self-insuring activities. We find that the information treatment decreased adoption of the input bundle by 5 percentage points and had no effect on wives' effort in male-controlled maize production.

I show theoretically how the adoption of a profitable, but capital intensive crop varietal can increase productive inefficiency insofar as it increases the cost of incentivizing household labor to the crop. I build on the separate spheres model of the household (Carter and Katz, 1997), in which spouses have individual preferences and individual property rights over income, by incorporating the assumption that spouses cooperate in the production of a risky, market good controlled by the husband. Husbands transfer co-produced, stochastic income to incentivize wives' economic cooperation. My model simulations show that wives' increased risk exposure leads them to require a prohibitively large share of co-generated income if they are to allocate labor in accordance with productive efficiency. I find that it is privately optimal for husbands to demand less labor from wives and curb total output in order to maximize their own income.

Where social norms stipulate that wives should have limited financial autonomy and responsibility, intra-household sharing rules may be understood as institutions that uphold these norms. I randomly assign couples to participate in an intra-household resource sharing game that provides a public forum in which husbands' dominant strategy is to incentivize wives to allocate their full time endowment to husband-controlled production. Participation feasibly led husbands to update their beliefs about adherence to income sharing norms among other husbands. I study the effect of the game treatment on income sharing outside the game. If husband-to-wife income transfers provide greater marginal incentives in communities that were randomly selected for game play than in control communities, this will provide suggestive evidence that norms around income sharing constrain intrahousehold incentives.

We evaluate the effect of an intra-household resource sharing game on households' propensity to adopt subsidized, improved maize seed. The incentivized game, played in couples, provided husbands the opportunity to test out various transfer schedules in the context of different production technologies and returns to wives' labor. The evaluation will provide evidence as to whether frictions in intra-household contracting ultimately constrain households' choice of technology.