Abstract
This study explores the effect of economic booms in male-dominated industries like mining on female intra-household decision-making power. Using the 2007–2008 global financial crisis as an exogenous event which led to a gold mining boom in Mexico, I find that women living in gold endowed municipalities experienced higher decision-making power contrary to some theoretical predictions. These results appear to be consistent with unitary household bargaining models which assume income pooling, as female decision-making power increased despite no changes in female labor force participation and an observed increase in male employment. Findings from a separate survey additionally show that while women residing in gold endowed states had higher decision-making power, they were also more likely to suffer from intimate partner violence (IPV). This suggests that a woman’s intra-household decision-making authority is not necessarily negatively correlated with her risk of IPV as posited in feminist theory.
Highlights
Mexico has a long-standing history of gold mining, where the practice of mining gold dates back to the pre-Hispanic times and contributed greatly to Latin America’s economic expansion during the colonial era
Contrary to non-unitary household bargaining models that predict a decline in a woman’s household bargaining power along with a concurrent increase in male employment opportunities generated by a mining boom for instance, the results from this study suggest that an increase in a husband’s outside option through better employment prospects relative to his wife’s, may not necessarily hamper her intra-household decision-making power ability
How accurate are theories that postulate a decrease in female decision-making power during booms in male-dominated sectors like gold mining? One existing study by Tolonen (2018) which focuses on Sub-Saharan Africa, did not discover any effects of gold mining on women’s intra-household decision-making outcomes
Summary
Mexico has a long-standing history of gold mining, where the practice of mining gold dates back to the pre-Hispanic times and contributed greatly to Latin America’s economic expansion during the colonial era. The impact on female decision-making outcomes generated by a mining boom could be different across geographic regions.3 Tolonen’s (2018) findings from her cross-country study on Sub-Saharan Africa may not be generalizable to countries like Mexico in the Latin American region. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: section II provides a background on gold mining in Mexico and discusses relevant theories relating income-generating opportunities to intra-household female decision-making; section III describes the data and empirical method used in this study; section IV presents the main results of the paper, discusses possible channels and additional outcomes like IPV, and reports a set of robustness checks; section V concludes
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