Inter-temporal and Spatial Price Dispersion Patterns and the Well-Being of Maize Producers in Southern Tanzania

We revisit a methodology to gauge the short-term effect of price changes on smallholder farmer's welfare that is popular amongst policy makers and academia. Realising that farmers face substantial seasonal price volatility over the course of an agricultural year, we pay particular attention to the timing of sales and purchases. In addition we depart from the implicit assumption that all farmers scattered across rural areas face the same prices when interacting with markets. Using maize marketing during the 2007–2008 agricultural season in a sample of smallholders in Tanzania as an illustration, we find that especially poor farmers face greater losses than what a standard analysis would suggest. We also relate our methodology to factors that are likely to affect potential benefits or costs from inter-temporal and spatial price dispersion, such as means of transport, access to price information and credit

Fertility and polygyny: Experimental evidence from Burkina Faso

Decision-making about fertility differs between monogamous and polygynous households. In an experiment in Burkina Faso that gives women access to free contraceptives, either alone or with their husband, involving the husband decreases contraceptive use among monogamous women, but not among polygynous women. Where there is co-wife rivalry, it increases contraceptive use. This is consistent with a model where monogamous women have a stronger preference for contraceptives than their husband, while this preference difference is smaller or even reversed among polygynous households due to co-wife competition around fertility

Excluded again: village politics at the aid interface

Making use of a rural household survey, we show that in villages with a stronger monopolisation of the aid interface by local elites, households are more likely excluded from all aid. Moreover, these villages have less access to aid but this tends to be insufficient for political alternatives to emerge spontaneously, mainly due to their relatively low visibility in these villages. Finally, if village members themselves manage to bring about a political change, this does not automatically improve the conditions of the most excluded. We recommend aid donors to assume a more active role in searching and selecting community representatives.

Resource Allocations and Disapproval Voting in Unequal Groups

Resources are often allocated in groups through decentralized nonmarket mechanisms. We experimentally investigate groups where a rich representative allocates resources among poorer members, who can announce disapproval by voting for a measure hurting the representative. We examine the effect of inequality aversion by keeping information on the allocation private in one and commonly known in another condition. Further, we investigate whether casting votes publicly or secretly influences allocation and voting behavior. We find that disapproval rates are highest with secret voting or a commonly known resource allocation. Disapproval voting fails to stimulate representatives to appear more prosocial, but rather induces them to keep everything. Private information on the allocation and public voting leads to least disapproval and exclusion of the poorest group members from the resources. The analysis shows that inequality aversion of poorer group members crucially interacts with the investigated institutional and informational details of the resource allocation situation

Aid Distribution and Co-operation in Unequal Communities

We study the influence of economic inequality on co-operation and aid distribution in community-based development schemes. For this, we organized a field experiment in which community members contributed to a collective effort to attract aid. We find that devolving aid distribution to community representatives increases the aid attracted, but that this benefits community representatives only. At the same time, however, community representatives do take fairness considerations into account. They give higher aid shares to poorer community members and lower shares to low contributors. Moreover, representatives with lower relative wealth or who contribute relatively more keep higher aid shares

A behavioural economic analysis of reproductive health in Burkina Faso and Tanzania 2016-2019

Sexual and reproductive health rights have gained importance over the last three decades. Despite the growing availability of reproductive health services, the uptake of these services remains inadequate among women in low-income countries. One of the main causes of the inadequate uptake of reproductive health services is women's weak control over pregnancy-related decisions. When and how many children to have, and whether and where to seek pre-natal, delivery and post-natal care, are crucial decisions that may shape an important pathway into or out of extreme poverty. To identify policy initiatives that can break the vicious circle between women's low empowerment, poor reproductive health and poverty, this project studies the decision-making processes around the use of reproductive health services. For this, it collected data in Burkina Faso and Tanzania on the uptake of reproductive health services as well as the decision-making process by married or co-habiting couples.The proposed research will contribute to answering the first overarching question of this call "What factors shape pathways into and out of poverty and people's experience of these, and how can policy create sustained routes out of extreme poverty in ways that can be replicated and scaled up?" The project will do so by focusing on the low or inadequate uptake of reproductive health services in sub-Saharan Africa which directly influences the health and survival prospects of women and their children, as well as their economic participation and poverty. Despite the growing availability of reproductive health services, the uptake of these services remains inadequate among the poorest in society. The research is timely because achieving 'universal access to reproductive health' was one of the Millennium Development Goals on which least progress was made in sub-Saharan Africa. The new Social Development Goals which will form the basis of the post-2015 development agenda have recognized this slow progress and have included updated reproductive health targets.</p

The effect of gender and gender pairing on bargaining: Evidence from an artefactual field experiment

Men and women negotiate differently, which might create gender inequality in earnings from bargaining. We study the role of gender and gender pairing in bilateral bargaining, using an artefactual field experiment in rural Uganda, in which pairs of participants bar-gain over the division of a fixed amount of resources. We vary the gender composition of the bargaining pairs as well as the disclosure of the participants' identities. We find gender differences in earnings and agreements, but only when identities and, thus, gen-ders are disclosed. Women in same-gender pairs obtain higher final earnings than men and women in mixed-gender pairs, which is due to the lower likelihood of disagree-ment among women-only pairs. We identify gender differences in demands and demand inconsistency-the money left on the table once demands are corrected for beliefs about the counterpart's demand-as mechanisms behind the observed gender differences in bar-gaining outcomes. In addition, we find that gender differences in demand inconsistency are related to gender differences in education and a measure of expected generosity.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conflicting risk attitudes

This paper examines whether differences in individual risk attitudes are related to interpersonal conflict. In more than thirty villages of rural Uganda, we conduct a social survey to document social links between pairs of individuals within a village, and separately elicit individual risk attitudes using an incentivized task. Our findings reveal that the difference in risk attitudes between two individuals is significantly and positively related to the presence of interpersonal conflict between them. This relationship is particularly strong among kin. By contrast, the strength of risk aversion per se is not related to conflict. Further, we conduct simulations that suggest that the relationship cannot be solely explained by diverging attitudes after the severing of social ties as a result of interpersonal conflict