Research

This paper studies how people use control in relationships based on trust. In many real-world interactions—from households to informal markets—partners shape one another’s behavior through threats, sanctions, or restrictions, yet such control is rarely observable in standard data. I design a modified trust game where trustors choose not simply whether to trust or not, but whether to trust freely or pre-commit to a destructive sanction that halves total payoffs if the trustee acts unfairly. This instrument captures how informal enforcement operates when formal institutions are weak. I implement a 2 x 2 lab-in-the-field experiment in Canada and Peru, which cross-randomizes sanction availability and participant location. Results show that control increases reciprocity in both settings but raises trust only in Peru, where formal enforcement is weaker. 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, the findings reveal the dual role of informal enforcement: sanctions can sustain cooperation where trust is fragile but corrode it where control violates social norms.

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.

In this paper, I develop a non-cooperative model of intrahousehold bargaining with asymmetric information to analyze spousal discordance and empowerment. Discordance is defined as the informational gap arising from asymmetric information: the husband holds a non-degenerate prior over the wife’s empowerment type, while the wife privately observes her own type. The model features a sequential game in which the husband may choose an ex-ante sanctioning strategy—an inefficient, non-violent instrument that reduces both spouses’ utilities—whose realized punishment depends on the wife’s privately observed type. The equilibrium analysis shows that sanctioning may intensify precisely when women’s empowerment increases, as feasibility and intensity depend jointly on beliefs, punishment costs, types, and household preferences over shared goods. At the same time, the model demonstrates that increases in women’s outside options need not reduce their equilibrium welfare, even when they generate greater strategic conflict within marriage. By isolating discordance under asymmetric information, the framework clarifies how coercive dynamics can arise even when preferences over household goods are aligned.

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, and mobility) 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 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, BIC-based, and adaptive LASSO) to test robustness and predictive stability. While the compound empowerment model performs consistently across specifications ($R^2 > 0.72$), 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.