CeDEx Brown Bag Seminar - Rachel Jones

Title: Gender inequality as a constraint to technology adoption

Abstract: Does intrahousehold inequality dampen the adoption of productivity enhancing agricultural technologies and eventually contribute to disadoption? I propose to examine this question within an experiment in Mozambique that promotes the adoption of an input bundle consisting of drought tolerant maize seed and index insurance. In this context of strong patriarchal norms and gendered resource allocation, I hypothesize that households will fail to respond optimally to the introduction of a lower risk, higher returns technology--in particular, that they will fail to expand acreage--if men, who make the decision to adopt and are the residual claimants of increases in productivity, fail to incentivize women to reallocate their labor away from subsistence production and household work. By informing a random subset of households of the potential benefits of an allocation of income in which women share in profits, I hope to show that household production is inefficiently small where status quo income sharing fails to induce an optimal supply of complementary labor.

Author: Rachel Jones is a graduate student in Agriculture and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis.