COVID-19, Crises and Women's Control of Resources: Evidence from Mexico

José Casco

No 2023-12, Working Papers from Banco de México

Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of crises on the intra-household allocation of resources. To study this issue, I use survey data from Mexico and estimate a structural model of household behavior to recover how much resources are allocated to each household member. Then, I construct a proxy for women's bargaining power using the women's control of resources and document how it evolves over periods of economic stability and contraction. The results suggest that during the COVID-19 crisis period, women's control of resources decreased relative to the non-recession period (4-5 percentage points) and the financial crisis (6-8 percentage points). This effect was more pronounced for households with children than those without children. Finally, I look into how this resource reallocation affects household consumption and individual poverty. The results of this paper highlight the heterogeneous behavior of intra-household inequality and women's bargaining power over the business cycle. It also suggests that the hypothesis that the financial crisis was a "man-cession" and the COVID-19 crisis was a "she-cession" holds in terms of intra-household resource allocation.

Keywords: Crisis; Resource shares; Control of resources; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 H12 I14 I30 J10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdm:wpaper:2023-12

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