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This paper studies how targeted cash transfers to women affect their empowerment. We use a novel identication 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.
Authors
CPP Co-Director
Orazio is an International Research Fellow at the IFS, a Professor at Yale and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Research Fellow University College London
Pedro is a Professor of Economics at University College London and an economist in the IFS' Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (cemmap).
Research Fellow Nova School of Business and Economics
Alex is an IFS Research Fellow, an Associate Professor at Nova School of Business and Economics and a Research Affiliate at the CEPR.
Research Associate Stockholm University
Ingvild, a Research Fellow, is a Professor of Economics at the Stockholm University and Principal Investigator at the Centre of Excellence FAIR.
Working Paper details
- DOI
- 10.1920/wp.cem.2016.0816
- Publisher
- The Institute for Fiscal Studies
Suggested citation
Almås, I et al. (2016). Measuring and Changing Control: Women's Empowerment and Targeted Transfers. London: The Institute for Fiscal Studies. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/measuring-and-changing-control-womens-empowerment-and-targeted-transfers (accessed: 28 April 2024).
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