| Resumen: |
Does placing monetary resources directly in the hands of mothers improve their bargaining position within the household? We explore the extent to which gender-targeted benefits can be used as policy levers to increase women’s decision-making power, individual welfare and household investments in children. To address this question, we develop and estimate a collective household model with home production using a structural approach. We use the exogenous variation induced by Oportunidades on observed household behavior to identify and estimate the Pareto weight which allows us to compute individual welfare money metric indices. Within this approach, we evaluate the impact of increasing women’s control of non-labor
income on the balance of decision-making power and individual welfare within two-parent
households. We find that participation in Oportunidades increased mothers’ bargaining power
by almost 24%, associated with a 20% increase in their individual welfare, and with a 25%
increase in the domestic production of a child-related public good. The counterfactual exercises implemented yield two policy-relevant takeaways. First, the Oportunidades program is
as effective as alternative cash transfer programs and significantly more effective than wage
subsidies at increasing mothers’ bargaining, individual welfare and domestic output. Second,
individual-level poverty rates computed using the money metric welfare index here proposed
can help improve the program’s targeting strategy by accounting for the unequal sharing of
resources within households. |
