 Smartphone use, off‐farm employment, and women's decision‐making power: Evidence from rural ChinaHongyun Zheng, Yuwen Zhou and Dil Rahut Review of Development Economics, 2023, vol. 27, issue 3, 1327-1353 Abstract: Empowering women is an important goal of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, and studies have proposed various strategies to achieve this goal. However, few have examined the role of smartphone use in empowering women in decision‐making and its mechanism. Therefore, this study analyzes how smartphone use affects women's decision‐making power and explores whether this influence is due to women's off‐farm employment mechanisms. For this purpose, the study uses the survey data of 1110 households in rural China and the endogenous treatment regression model for analysis. The control function approach addresses the selection bias of off‐farm employment. The results show that smartphone use significantly increases women's decision‐making power, partially channeled through increasing women's off‐farm employment. The mechanism effect is robust to using both binary and intensive measurements of off‐farm employment. Therefore, a policy to improve access to internet facilities and smartphone use could improve women's decision‐making power through employment in the off‐farm sector. Date: 2023 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:rdevec:v:27:y:2023:i:3:p:1327-1353 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Review of Development Economics is currently edited by E. Kwan Choi More articles in Review of Development Economics from Wiley Blackwell |
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