Measuring and Changing Control: Women's Empowerment and Targeted Transfers

Arbeitspapier

This paper studies how targeted cash transfers to women affect their empowerment. We use a novel identification strategy to measure women's willingness to pay to receive cash transfers instead of their partner receiving it. We apply this among women living in poor households in urban Macedonia. We match experimental data with a unique policy intervention (CCT) in Macedonia offering poor households cash transfers conditional on having their children attending secondary school. The program randomized whether the transfer was offered to household heads or mothers at municipality level, providing us with an exogenous source of variation in (offered) transfers. We show that women who were offered the transfer reveal a lower willingness to pay, and we show that this is in line with theoretical predictions.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 9779

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Household Production and Intrahousehold Allocation ; Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development ; Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
• Subject: gender ; empowerment ; cash transfers ; intra-household

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Almås, Ingvild ; Armand, Alex ; Attanasio, Orazio ; Carneiro, Pedro
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2016

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/141538
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET