Gender, Bargaining, and Investment: Experimental Evidence from Rural Cameroon

We study spouses’ differences in risk preferences, the relative influence of spouses on household decisions under risk, and the implications on household education and health investment decisions in rural Cameroon. Using a lab-in-the-field experiment in which husbands and wives choose between different pairs of risky lotteries individually and then jointly as a couple, we find that husbands and wives have distinct risk preferences. Husbands most often influence the couple’s decision-making, though there are also couples whose decision is dominated by the wives. Using differences in choices between spouses and couples during the lab-in-the-field experiment, we construct a novel and improved proxy for women’s bargaining power which better captures the magnitude of influence women have over the couple’s decision-making. Our metric is uncorrelated with investment in children’s education as well as both preventative and reactive health.We explore the relations between preferences, individual bargaining power, and social norms, and we argue the lack of a correlation between women’s bargaining power and investments in human capital is driven by social norms: even the most empowered women believe that most household decisions are primarily a responsibility of their husbands. Our findings, therefore, highlight the importance of mitigating the influence of social norms regarding gender roles in the family.Tackling these norms may be a necessary condition for standard policy interventions (e.g. vocational training and income support) to be highly effective in promoting development and gender equality.