CeDEx Seminar - Alistair Munro (National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo)

This week's seminar will be given by Alistair Munro from National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.

Title: Intra-household inequality and productivity: evidence from a real-effort experiment in rural Uganda

Abstract: This paper investigates experimentally how changes in wage rates and entitlements affect individual productivity in lab-in-the-field experiments run with married couples from rural regions in Uganda. We design a game in which the production task itself is straightforward and identical for all players, but where the rules governing payment vary across subjects and between rounds. For example we vary the price paid for each completed item so that the ratio of male to female wages varies from 0.5 to 2. All this is done transparently so that both partners know the rules of the game. The results generally indicate that a rise in relative wages lowers relative effort, a result that is contrary to the most straightforward interpretation of standard models of the household, but compatible with some evidence on the effects of temporary wage rises on labour supply.