Share and Share Alike: The Impact of Rainfall on Gendered Income Allocation in Malawi

Anna Josephson

No 277183, 2018 Conference, July 28-August 2, 2018, Vancouver, British Columbia from International Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: Studies of intra-household resource allocation have typically omitted income earned jointly, by two or more individuals. To explore this important dynamic, I empirically test the assumption that all household income is pooled, when joint income, as well as income earned individually by men and women, is accounted for in the analysis. I develop a collective intra-household model which explicitly includes joint and individual relationships to explain income allocation. Exogenous variation in rainfall is used to examine if households pool resources and insure one another against income shocks, resulting from these rainfall shifts. I reject the hypothesis of complete income pooling and full insurance within the household. However, I find evidence that households members pool income and insure one another for expenditures on essential goods. Conversely, they do not pool income and do not insure one another for luxury goods. I conclude that there is strategic income pooling behavior with respect to particular types of expenditure. These results are contrary to previous studies, which fail to find even partial insurance for essential goods within households. The conclusions of this study provide a novel perspective on intra-household dynamics which highlight the need to consider joint relationships in household analyses. Acknowledgement :

Keywords: Labor; and; Human; Capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/277183/files/1238.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Share and Share Alike: The Impact of Rainfall on Gendered Income Allocation in Malawi (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:iaae18:277183

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.277183

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2018 Conference, July 28-August 2, 2018, Vancouver, British Columbia from International Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().