Control of Resources, Bargaining Power and the Demand of Food: Evidence from PROGRESA

Denni Tommasi

No 2018-22, Working Papers ECARES from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: I use a structural model of households to recover how much resources each individual controls in the context of the Mexican PROGRESA program. I find that the eligibility to receive the cash transfers induces a redistribution of resources from the father to both the mother and children, although the mother is the one benefiting the most. With these information I compute individual poverty rates and quantify to what extent the program reduces within-household inequality. I also combine these measures to construct a proxy for women’s bargaining power and, using causal identification techniques, I estimate its direct effects on household demand for food. Exploiting random assignment of the cash transfers as an instrumental variable for the treatment of interest, I show that mothers having majority control of household resources relative to fathers increase food consumption as a share of the household budget by 6.5-8.3 percent. I use these estimates to argue that, by knowing (i) The distribution of pre-program resources inside the household, and (ii) How much influence each decision maker can have on the desired policy outcome, a policymaker can improve the cost-effectiveness of a cash transfer program by targeting the cash to resource shares in addition to gender.

Keywords: cash transfers; PROGRESA; structural model; collective model; resource shares; poverty; causality; LATE; engel curves; food (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 p.
Date: 2018-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-dev
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Journal Article: Control of resources, bargaining power and the demand of food: Evidence from PROGRESA (2019)
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