Essays on Intra-Household Decision-Making and Poverty Transfers
2020-06
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Essays on Intra-Household Decision-Making and Poverty Transfers
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2020-06
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This dissertation studies the effects of poverty transfer policies on the behavior of households. Chapter 1, studies how different types of households determine adult members’ allocations of time and consumption. Household types are characterized by the presence of partner violence and cash transfers. Using a collective intra-household decision making model, together with data from an experimental evaluation of a cash transfer program in Ecuador, I structurally estimate the parameters of the model. Then, I perform a poverty analysis at the individual level for the different types of households and find that women are substantially poorer than men, and that income distribution is more unequal for women than it is for men. I also find that the policy intervention generated welfare gains in terms of reducing overall and individual poverty. However, these welfare gains are heterogeneous among the different types of households. Particularly, I find that transfers are effective in reducing the gender poverty gap mainly in households where there is no violence. Finally, I estimate indifference scales for the different types of households to measure how much income an individual living alone needs to have in order to be as well off as when living as a couple. I find that men need a higher share of initial household resources compared to women, and that indifference scales for women decrease with violence and increase when the household is a beneficiary of the transfer. This work contributes to understanding how intra-household allocation of resources takes place among different types of households, the importance of gender difference in poverty and inequality, and the effectiveness of poverty policies when there are factors that generate inequality in consumption. Chapter 2 analyzes how exogenous changes in household income coming from a cash transfer program alter the bargaining power of the recipient and the allocation of time within the family. Using a large-scale living standards measurement survey from Ecuador, I am able to implement a fuzzy regression discontinuity by exploiting the government mechanisms to assign beneficiaries of the program. Then, I examine the impact the cash transfer has on women’s and men’s hours of paid work, housework, community activities and leisure, as well as whether resource transfers to women through BDH program are in fact effective in improving women’s positions within the household, as measured by several questions about decision-making power. I find that the conditional cash transfer program affects the women’s freedom to decide (bargaining power) as well as women’s time allocation to certain activities. Chapter 3 investigates the effect of a cash transfer on the household decisions regarding child activities (schooling, work, leisure), and the allocation of hours towards working activities. For this analysis, I use data from a randomized evaluation of a conditional cash transfer program in Ecuador. The empirical results suggest that the most prevalent behavioral shift caused by the program was a reduction in the probability that the household decide only sending the child to work, an increase in the probability that the household chooses concurrently work and school, and an increase in the likelihood that a household chooses schooling only for the child. Moreover, these effects are heterogeneous among boys and girls. On the other hand, the transfer reduced the allocation of time to certain child working activities, but these results are mainly driven by the effect of the transfer at the extensive margin. To rationalize these findings, I develop a theoretical model of parental decision regarding child activities. With this framework, I argue that a cash transfer attenuates the likelihood of parents choosing leisure and market work for their child and increases the likelihood that they send the child to school. By modeling the cash transfer as a subsidy of the human capital input and as lump sum transfer, this study also contributes to the discussion of whether cash transfers should be conditional (on school enrollment) or unconditional.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2020. Major: Applied Economics. Advisor: Paul Glewwe. 1 computer file (PDF); xiv, 191 pages.
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Casco Guerra, Jose. (2020). Essays on Intra-Household Decision-Making and Poverty Transfers. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/216407.
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