Research

Work in Progress

When Does Child Voice Matter? Educational Investment and Parent-Child Dynamics

Job Market Paper

Draft coming soon.

Educational investment decisions are rarely made by parents alone: children in developing countries often have agency over their own schooling, yet this dimension is largely absent from existing models of household decision-making. This paper studies how the conditions under which parents and children act jointly shape educational investment outcomes. I model the problem as a non-cooperative threshold public goods game, in which both the parent and child simultaneously decide how to allocate their resources between education and household consumption.

Using a lab-in-the-field experiment conducted with 300 parent-child pairs in rural Benin, I manipulate three distinct conditions: resource control (asymmetric endowments), decision control (veto power), and communication. I study how each of these interacts with the degree of preference alignment between parents and children to determine whether households reach the investment threshold. Preliminary evidence suggests that children on average have a stronger preference for education than their parents, and that coordination failures are common: households fail to reach the efficient threshold even when it would be in both parties’ interest to do so.

Bottom-up Discrimination by Gender: Insights from Benin’s Pineapple Sector

With Catherine Guirkinger (UNamur) and Jean-Philippe Platteau (UNamur)

Draft available upon request.

Do workers in rural labor markets discriminate against female employers? This paper investigates bottom-up gender discrimination in Benin’s pineapple sector, where women increasingly enter a production line traditionally dominated by men. Using a four-part lab-in-the-field experiment conducted with 501 agricultural workers across five municipalities in southern Benin, we disentangle taste-based discrimination from strategic opportunism as drivers of differential worker behavior toward male and female producers. We find no evidence of systematic taste-based discrimination against female employers: workers are equally split in their stated preferences, and willingness-to-pay estimates reveal no gender bias on average. Instead, the dominant driver of differential behavior is strategic: workers exploit female producers’ comparatively weaker monitoring capacity, leading to higher labor shirking when contracts are offered by women and monitoring is unannounced. We further document a distinct form of opportunism (input pilfering) which is specifically targeted at inexperienced female producers, whose low supervision probability and limited detection capacity make them the most vulnerable to this type of fraud. These findings suggest that in contexts pervaded by incentive problems, discrimination against female employers may manifest not as a refusal to work for them, but as a preference to do so in order to extract rents.

Husbands in the Room: The Impact of Joint vs. Women-Only Training on Household Dynamics in Benin

With Pablo Álvarez Aragón (UNamur), Catherine Guirkinger (UNamur) and Anna Jolivet (UNamur)

AEA RCT Registry: AEARCTR-0008898

Pineapple is a dynamic value chain in Benin that attracts investments from various stakeholders. Small-scale farmers produce the majority of the crop and most of them are men. Although women play an important role in agriculture overall and often manage their own fields, few of them cultivate pineapple on their fields. They face several specific, gender-related constraints preventing their involvement in this productive activity, including liquidity constraints, problems with the planification of activities over the course of the 18 months production cycle, bookkeeping or competing demands on their time. Exploratory field work reveals that husbands’ support is a crucial determinant of women’s success in this activity. A husband may offer financial support or help in monitoring workers for example. This raises the following questions: Is this support offering a (second-best) substitute for access to financial market or training or is it rather a complement (or a necessary condition) for a woman’s investment in this productive activity? What are the costs of seeking one husband’s help for one’s own business? Why are some husbands reluctant in offering this support? May this support be stimulated by an exogenous intervention? We investigate these questions taking advantage from an intervention set up by the Belgian Development Agency (Enabel) in order to encourage women involvement in pineapple production. It includes a business training and a generous subsidy for women to start or to expand a pineapple production. With a view to stimulate husbands’ support, in some groups, husbands have been invited to take part in the training and design, with their wife, an action plan for her pineapple production.