In a setting where husbands wield considerable coercive power, forms of marriage should adapt to protect the interests of women and their families. The authors study the pervasive marriage custom of watta satta in rural Pakistan, a bride exchange between families coupled with a mutual threat of...

Despite wide use of women's decisionmaking indicators, both as a direct measure of intrahousehold decisionmaking and as a proxy for women's empowerment or bargaining power, little has been done to explore what such indicators capture and how effective they measure program impacts on empowerment....

We examine the role of gender in adoption and diffusion of orange sweet potato, a biofortified staple food crop being promoted as a strategy to increase dietary intakes of vitamin A among young children and adult women in Uganda. As an agricultural intervention with nutrition objectives,...

Conditional cash transfer programs that transfer resources to women have considerable scope to increase women's decision-making power. Yet evidence of this effect is limited. We provide the first direct quantitative evidence of a CCT's impact on women's decision making, showing heterogeneity...