We report on a randomized field experiment using price incentives to address both economic and gender inequality in land tenure formalization.  During the 1990s and 2000s, nearly two dozen African countries proposed de jure land reforms extending access to formal, freehold land tenure to...

While the impact of globalization on income inequality has received a lot of attention, little is known about its effect on the gender wage gap (GWG).  This study argues that there is a systematic difference in the GWG between exporting firms and non-exporters.  By the virtue of being exposed...

This paper provides a causal reason for failure in productive efficiency in the household and explains why some households may be less efficient than others.  In the theoretical model, spouses make labour allocation decisions in each period to generate income, facing a threat of divorce in the...

In the past 30 years, microfinance has carried many promises of social and economic transformation, with the shift towards targeting women being seen as a major strategic move through which the promise of social development could be most effectively delivered.  However, ethnographic studies...

Why is it that couples who have a son or whose last child is a son earn higher conditional income?  To solve this curious case we tell a detective story: evidence of a phenomenon to be explained, a parade of suspects, a process of elimination from the enquiry, and then the denouement.  Given...

This paper revisits the issue of the intra-household of education with the recently available India Human Development Survey which refers to 2005 and covers both urban and rural areas.  In addition to the traditional Engel method, the paper utilizes a Hurdle model to disentangle the decision to...

This paper tests three hypotheses concerning intra-household resource allocation in rural China. First, whether increasing the women's bargaining power alters household expenditure patterns. Second, whether households allocate fewer resourced to daughters than to sons. Third, whether increasing...

Despite the well-documented increase in the relative wages and expenditures of highly-educated individuals in the U.S. in recent decades, leisure inequality mirrors inequality of wages, i.e. we observe that highly-educated individuals have now relatively less leisure time than lower-educated...

In this paper we pose the question: to what extent is education responsible for the differential labour market outcomes of women and men in urban India. In particular, we investigate the extent to which education contributes to women's observed lower labour force participation and earnings than...

This paper uses demand analysis to explore whether intrahousehold allocation of education expenditure differs between boys and girls in rural Sri Lanka.  Contrary to most countries in South Asia a significant bias favouring girls is found in 1990/91 for the 5-9 and 17-19 age groups and in...