Research

This paper studies how people use control in relationships based on trust. In many real-world interactions—from households to informal markets—partners seek to shape one another’s behavior through threats, sanctions, or restrictions—whether a spouse withholding shared resources or a lender threatening to seize a borrower’s collateral—yet such controlling behavior is difficult to observe in standard data. To address this, I design a modified trust game in which trustors choose not between trust and distrust, but between trusting freely and attempting to control—by pre-committing to cut total payoffs in half if the trustee acts unfairly. This instrument introduces a destructive but decentralized form of deterrence, capturing how informal enforcement operates when formal institutions are weak. I implement a 2 x 2 lab-in-the-field experiment in Canada and Peru, cross-randomizing the availability of the control instrument and participant location. Results show that control consistently increases reciprocity in both settings, but only raises trust in Peru, where formal enforcement is weaker. Moreover, trustors who refrain from controlling—even when the option is available—earn higher returns, suggesting that restraint itself functions as a credible signal of goodwill. Together, these findings reveal the dual role of informal enforcement: instruments of control can both sustain and corrode cooperation, depending on the institutional context.

We investigate the influence of beliefs about gender norms on labour supply, leisure, and domestic work in Lima, Peru, with a focus on how these beliefs affect the allocation of time between market and domestic work. Gender norms, especially with regard to caregiving, are recognized as barriers to women’s full participation in the economy. However, less is known about how these norms shape household time use. We measure individual and common beliefs about gender norms in the labor market, education, and domestic work using a lab-in-the-field experiment with 500 participants from low-income neighbourhoods. We find that while both men and women generally support gender equity, there are significant misperceptions, particularly among women. Indeed, women tend to largely understate how inclined towards gender equity they believe their peers to be, especially their male peers. We find that gender norms influence time allocation, with women less likely to be responsible for domestic duties if they hold progressive gender beliefs. While gender norms beliefs do not appear to influence how men allocate their time between market and domestic work, their beliefs do influence how domestic chores are allocated within the household. Both men and women with individual and common beliefs that are inclined towards gender equity report a lower probability that the wife is the person responsible for household tasks that are typically gendered (like cleaning and childcare). This research contributes to understanding the differences between individual and common beliefs about gender norms, how these depend on different reference groups, and how gender norms shape the division of labour in the household.

This paper develops a non-cooperative model of intrahousehold bargaining to analyze how spousal discordance—defined as a mismatch between expectations and experiences in household decision-making—shapes autonomy, conflict, and punishment dynamics. I model a sequential game in which the husband can exert an ex-ante threat of shading: a strategic form of non-cooperation that includes subtle acts such as emotional withdrawal, implicit disapproval, or undermining autonomy without overt violence. The framework relaxes the assumption of common knowledge over bargaining power and treats discordance as both a source of inefficiency and a trigger for punitive behavior. The model yields several novel insights: shading is not necessarily decreasing in the wife’s reservation utility, nor necessarily increasing in the husband’s. The threshold required to force the wife into a low-empowerment state depends jointly on her empowerment probabilities, her disutility from punishment, the distance between empowerment types, and household preferences over public goods. From the husband’s perspective, the incentive to refrain from shading increases with his own disutility from conflict, the cost of discordance, and expectations about the wife’s likely response. These results highlight that sustainable female empowerment requires shifting not only women’s outside options, but also the opportunity cost of coercion for men—suggesting a dual-lever policy approach.

This paper examines how women’s intra-household bargaining power shapes modern contraceptive use in Zambia, using data from the 2018 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). Bargaining power is proxied through standard DHS indicators of decision-making autonomy (e.g., healthcare, purchases, mobility, contraception) and financial capability. A core contribution is the construction of couple-level disagreement metrics: using matched partner data, I distinguish not only between concordance and discordance, but also the direction of mismatch—whether women claim more decision-making power than their husbands report (“power-taking”), or less (“power-giving”). Women with both financial autonomy and sole authority over healthcare decisions are 87% more likely to use modern contraception; sole authority over contraceptive decisions alone increases this probability by 56%. Couples with shared recognition of women’s empowerment show higher uptake (16.7% increase), as do couples where women assert more power than their husbands acknowledge (14.6%), consistent with feminist theories of “power within.” I also apply LASSO-based model selection methods (cross-validated LASSO, BIC minimization, and adaptive LASSO) to test robustness and predictive stability. While the compound empowerment model performs consistently across specifications (R2> 0.72), the discordance model underperforms—highlighting the empirical limits of modeling subjective household dynamics. To interpret these findings, I propose a stylized behavioral framework—the Compound-Discordance Model—which formalizes how empowerment, financial autonomy, and spousal alignment interact to shape contraceptive behavior. Together, the empirical and theoretical results underscore the need to move beyond static, additive models of “who decides,” toward a more relational and psychologically grounded account of reproductive autonomy.