Research

WORKING PAPERS

Job Market Paper:  Expanding access to schooling in Nigeria: Impact on Marital Outcomes (with Rozenn Hotte) [PDF]

The paper uses the Universal Primary Education Program (UPE) implemented in Nigeria in 1976 to investigate the effect of wife and husband's education on women's empowerment. We combine regional disparities in baseline levels of enrollment with the timing of the program and the traditionally high age difference between partners to disentangle the impact of wife's education from husband's education. The UPE had heterogeneous effects in the South compared to the North of Nigeria. In the South, women achieve more gender-equal marriages by delaying marriage by 1.23 years, and by reducing the age gap with their husband by 2 years. More educated women also maintain a stable education gap with their husband. In the North, unions' characteristics remain unchanged except for the probability to marry a polygamous partner that increases when husbands are treated. In both regions, women are better off as the UPE decreases women's tolerance of domestic violence and increases their say in decision-making but the mechanic of the effects differ: Northern women are made better off by the education of their husband's whereas Southern women are better off thanks to the combined effects of their own education and their husband's.

Using List Experiments to Measure Intimate Partner Violence (IPV): Lessons from Rural Burkina Faso

I implement a measurement exercise and compare the estimates of the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) obtained with direct questions and with a list experiment (LE), an indirect non-conventional measure for sensitive opinion or behavior. I measure the prevalence of several types of IPV (less severe physical violence, severe physical violence and marital rape) among women living in rural areas of Burkina Faso and find that the direct measures of IPV underestimate by 7 to 9 percentage points the most intense forms of violence. I also find that IPV correlates differently with a series of respondents’ characteristics according to the measure of IPV used, including whether the first child of a woman is a girl. This work fuels a critical debate around the relevance of the current measures of IPV in household surveys that seem to significantly underestimate the prevalence of IPV.

PUBLICATIONS

Effects of Primary Education on Women’s Marital Outcomes (with Rozenn Hotte) [PDF] Accepted, at the World Bank Economic Review

The paper examines the effect of human capital acquired in primary school on women's marital outcomes in Benin. We exploit a sharp increase in school constructions in the 1990s to assess the causal impact of an increase in primary school supply on primary school attendance, age at marriage and tolerance of intimate partner violence (IPV). Using the quasi-experimental geographical and historical variations in the number of schools built, we find that the school building program increased the probability of attending primary school in rural areas, increased age at marriage, and decreased the probability for women to be tolerant of wife beating and to experience IPV.

Household resources and individual strategies (with Christelle Dumas and Sylvie Lambert), World Development (2020)

The question of diverging interests and preferences within couples over the use of household resources and the consequences of these conflictual views has been present for a long time in the development literature, albeit in a somewhat scattered way. This paper selectively reviews the abundant literature that offers insights into the intra-household decision-making process, the strategies put in place by individuals to secure their access to private resources, and the role of the changing economic environment in altering these mechanisms. This paper bridges different strands of the social sciences and exemplifies the complementarities among them. The main features of household organization are described to set the scene for the individual strategies introduced to bypass intra-household negotiations and secure access to private resources. These strategies include efforts to maintain access to income-earning opportunities and secrecy about income and savings. This paper also discusses attempts to maintain or tilt the balance of power within the household through the use of violence, on the one hand, and marital and fertility choices on the other hand. Finally, this paper describes directions for future research aimed at improving the understanding of household behaviour and responses to economic stimuli.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Within family dynamics and domestic violence in Burkina Faso