Measuring and changing control: women's empowerment and targeted transfers

Abstract

This article uses a novel identification strategy to measure power in the household. Our strategy is to elicit women’s willingness to pay to receive a cash transfer instead of their spouse receiving it. We selected participants from a sample of women who had already participated in a policy intervention in Macedonia offering poor households cash transfers conditional on having their children attending secondary school. The programme randomised transfers at the municipality level to either household heads (generally a male) or mothers. We show that women who were offered the transfer on average have stronger measured empowerment. Here, IV estimation confirms this result.