Job Market Paper:
Her Account, Her Way: The Impact of Digital Cash Transfers on Household Decision Making
This study examines the impact of a debit card on women's empowerment using the natural experiment that took place in South Africa when the government converted its social cash transfer programme to digital form by switching from cash handouts to debit cards. According to the findings, providing a woman control over her own credit card provides her more influence over household spending and money management. Having direct control over money and how it is spent leads to economic empowerment, which reduces household expenditure on addictive goods like alcohol and cigarettes.
By employing a placebo test of a rise in income proxied by an increase in the number of children that individual has, I confirm that my results are robust to changes in income since the grant receipts for child support increased over the study period by ZAR70 (US$14). I compare the household decision-making of people who had additional children born over this period such that they would have received extra child support from the government of ZAR210 (US$41), a figure that is three times larger than the increase in child support grant, using data from the first wave conducted in 2008 and the second wave, which are 4 years before the card was introduced.