CeDEx Seminar - Abigail Barr (University of Nottingham)

Inter-spousal normative disagreements and willingness to pay for individual control over money: A lab-in-the-field study in rural Zambia 

Abigail Barr, Marleen Dekker, Floyd Mwansa, Tia Linda Zuze 

Abstract: Using a specially designed series of incentivised tasks we, first, investigate Zambian wives’ and husbands’ willingness to pay to maintain individual control over income and whether and how it is affected by the extent to which they can keep their choices hidden from their spouses. Then, we investigate whether and how this willingness to pay for individual control over income relates to gender-specific social norms and/or disagreements in individually held behavioural prescriptions between husbands and wives about who, within a household, should control money.  We find that: spouses in Zambia are willing to compromise household-level income in order to maintain individual control over income; that wives but not husbands compromise household-level income in order to maintain individual control over income more when they can do it without their spouses knowing; and that these behaviours do not relate to gender-specific social norms but do relate to disagreements in individually held behavioural prescriptions between husbands and wives.