Abstract
This paper studies how targeted cash transfers to women affect their empowerment. We use a novel identification 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.
Highlights
Most conditional cash transfer programs around the world select a woman in the household to be the recipient of the transfer (Fiszbein et al, 2009)
Some studies suggest that one possible channel through which targeting payments to women affects family decisions is by changing the control of resources within the household and the decision power of each household member
Protocol As we discuss in more detail below, participants in the experiment were respondents to the household survey that was collected for the evaluation of the Conditional Cash Transfer program in Macedonia
Summary
Most conditional cash transfer programs around the world select a woman in the household to be the recipient of the transfer (Fiszbein et al, 2009). Some studies suggest that one possible channel through which targeting payments to women affects family decisions is by changing the control of resources within the household and the decision power of each household member. The experiment identifies the values that makes the participants indifferent between receiving X or letting their spouse receive Y, which gives us the respondent’s willingness to pay for receiving a transfer instead of having their partner receive it. This willingness to pay measure can be matched with data used to study a nationwide cash transfer program.
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