The World Bank Economic Review Advance Access published online on May 22, 2008
The World Bank Economic Review, doi:10.1093/wber/lhn006
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Women's Power, Conditional Cash Transfers, and Schooling in Nicaragua
Correspondence: Email address is sgitter{at}towson.edu
JEL codes: D13, H31, I20
The Social Safety Net (Red de Protección Social, RPS) program in Nicaragua is one of many conditional cash transfer programs that pay households cash stipends in exchange for school attendance and regular visits to health clinics by the children. A key feature is that payments go to the female head of household. Previous research suggests that exogenous transfers to women are more likely to be spent on their children's health, nutrition, and education and thus to reinforce the goals of these programs. Randomized experimental data from RPS are used to test for heterogeneous program impacts on school enrollment and spending based on a woman's power, as proxied by her years of schooling relative to her husband's years of schooling. The results confirm previous findings that more household resources are devoted to children when women are more powerful. However, when a woman's power greatly exceeds her husband's, additional female power reduces school enrollment. RPS impacts on schooling are much larger than the expected income effects estimated from the control group, although no evidence is found that female power alters the impact of RPS on school enrollment. The conditionality of RPS is probably decisive. While RPS significantly increases food and education expenditures, the impact is attributable primarily to income effects.
Seth R. Gitter (corresponding author) is an assistant professor of economics at Towson University. Bradford L. Barham is a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; his email address is barham{at}aae.wisc.edu. The authors thank IFPRI for providing the data and Michael Carter, Jean-Paul Chavas, Jeremy Foltz, Carolyn Heinrich, John Maluccio, Jaime de Melo, seminar participants at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and three anonymous reviewers for their guidance and comments on earlier drafts.