Friends in the village: Do they matter for women's involvement in household decisions?

D'Exelle, Ben ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9332-5223 and Ignowski, Liz (2023) Friends in the village: Do they matter for women's involvement in household decisions? Journal of Population Economics, 36 (4). 3005–3028. ISSN 0933-1433

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Abstract

It is often assumed that social connections are good for female empowerment in developing countries. However, growing evidence suggests that empowered women may face backlash from their spouse. In this paper, we analyze how the number of friends that wives have in their village affects the wives’ involvement in household decisions about their own health and their children’s health. To do so, we use data from 700 couples in 30 villages in rural Tanzania. We estimate the effect of the number of friends on the wife’s involvement in household decisions using a multinomial logit regression combined with a control function that deals with potential endogeneity bias. We find that wives with more friends are less likely to make decisions jointly with their husband, and are more likely to report that their husband makes decisions without their involvement. We further explore whether the effects depend on the “type” of friends, as defined by their gender and whether they are shared with the husband.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Acknowledgements: We acknowledge the financial support of the ESRC-DFID grant ES/N014618/1 and KU Leuven (Methusalem Program). We thank editor Kompal Sinha and three anonymous reviewers. We also thank Simon Sichalwe, Ramadhan Hashim, Denna Michael, the medical district officer of Misungwi and the team of enumerators in Tanzania for assistance during the fieldwork, and MITU-NIMR for institutional support. Data availability: The data and code are available upon request from the authors for replication purposes.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	intra-household decision-making,rural tanzania,social networks,demography,economics and econometrics ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3317
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Economics Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Global Development (formerly School of International Development)
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Sciences Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Behavioural Economics Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Behavioural and Experimental Development Economics Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Environment, Resources and Conflict Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Gender and Development Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Impact Evaluation
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	14 Aug 2023 10:31
Last Modified:	23 Nov 2023 01:59
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/92857
DOI:	10.1007/s00148-023-00973-x

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