Social norms can mitigate the effectiveness of formal institutions, in particular the way legal reforms may affect women's autonomy. We examine this question in the context of ethnic variation in traditional post-marital cohabitation, i.e. matrilocality versus patrilocality. We use...

In this paper, we explore the links between polygyny and female labour supply in Senegal using a nationally representative survey. In a reduced-form approach, we first measure the impact of polygyny on participation using a joint model of spouse participation. The identification of the impact of...

Increasing women's empowerment is a key objective of many development programs, both as a principal goal and as a path to economic development. We propose and test a novel economic intervention that relies on intra-household transfers of productive assets to increase women's empowerment among...

An emerging literature highlights the importance of empowering women. Female decision-making power is typically measured by surveying only one partner, but the few studies surveying both have documented large differences in perceptions. We analyze these perceptions and their consequences, using...

This paper analyses the effect of migration of men from rural areas in Pakistan on children in households "left behind" by the migrants. Left-behind households' expenditure on children's education and the gendered distribution of these expenditures are two outcomes of main interest. First, it is...

Social norms can mitigate the effectiveness of formal institutions, in particular the way legal reforms may affect women's autonomy. We examine this question in the context of ethnic variation in traditional post-marital cohabitation, i.e. matrilocality versus patrilocality. We use...

This paper considers the relationship between work status and decision-making power of the head of household and his spouse. I use household fixed effects models to address the possibility that spousal work status may be correlated with unobserved factors that also affect bargaining power within...