Whose voice matters? An examination of women’s empowerment in microfinance
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ACDE Seminar
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It has been suggested that offering microcredit to women to empower them may be ineffective as women borrowers hand over the control of loans to their husbands. We thus conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment to examine whether gender bias exists in intra-household decision-making in rural Bangladesh. The experiment mimics a real-life scenario where microcredit was offered to either the wife or the husband in a household and the borrower could decide whether to make his/her own investment choice or to transfer the decision-making to the spouse. We find that women are more likely to let their spouses make decision, compared with their male counterparts. Different treatments in the experiment also allow us to test and quantify the underlying causes of the bias. Our findings show women’s decision to transfer the decision-making is driven both by their lower decision-making power and their belief that their spouses are more capable of making financial decisions. We also look at subjects’ control over use of earnings from the investment and find offering credit to women did not improve their control, irrespective of whether or not they let their spouses make the investment decision.
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