Conditional cash transfers to mothers, intrahousehold allocations: the role of unobservability

Debosree Banerjee () and Stephan Klasen
Additional contact information
Debosree Banerjee: National Institute of Advanced Studies

International Journal of Economic Policy Studies, 2022, vol. 16, issue 1, No 13, 275-296

Abstract: Abstract Over the past few decades, conditional cash transfers (CCT) to households have become an increasingly important tool to generate socially desirable outcomes in human capital development programs. Subsequently, there has been a spur of literature evaluating the impacts of CCTs on poor households, mostly showing a positive impact. Yet, we argue that these impacts are not independent of intrahousehold processes of resource allocation and without a proper understanding of this process, the policy objectives might fail. We particularly look at the case of CCT to mothers and its impact on child human capital accumulation when there is intrahousehold uncertainty. Using an experimental setup in Karnataka, South India, we find that, given an endowment, when mothers cannot observe spousal investment preferences in children, they respond by lowering their willingness to invest in children and increasing precautionary savings. We argue that in a noncooperative environment, without information sharing and unobservability, uncertainties within marriage might result in inefficient allocation of resources. In other words, with the unobservability of spousal preference and resulting uncertainties, resources tend to be under-allocated in household public goods such as children failing the policy objectives of CCT.

Keywords: Conditional cash transfer; Noncooperation; Asymmetric information; Unobservability; Uncertainty; Mothers’ willingness to invest (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s42495-021-00078-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
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:spr:ijoeps:v:16:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1007_s42495-021-00078-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... policy/journal/42495

DOI: 10.1007/s42495-021-00078-x

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Economic Policy Studies is currently edited by Akira Maeda

More articles in International Journal of Economic Policy Studies from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().