Does Africa Need a Rotten Kin Theorem? Experimental Evidence from Village Economies

By Pamela Jakiela, Owen Ozier. 2012

405 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper measures the economic impact of social pressure to share income with kin and neighbors in rural Kenyan villages. The authors conduct a lab experiment in which they randomly vary the observability of investment returns. The goal is to test whether subjects reduce their income in order to keep it hidden. The analysis finds that women adopt an investment strategy that conceals the size of their initial endowment in the experiment, although that strategy reduces their expected earnings. This effect is largest among women with relatives attending the experiment. Parameter estimates suggest that women behave as though they expect to be pressured to share four percent of their observable income with others, and substantially more when close kin can observe income directly. Although this paper provides experimental evidence from a single African country, observational studies suggest that similar pressure from kin may be prevalent in many rural areas throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/108ea4f5a2b12e4a2a9c11dca29601dd8b975c39

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Gender Studies

In Safety Research

Citations in the corpus

The Cost of Convenience? (2017, positive): “Savings devices that are difficult or expensive to access may aid individuals in protecting their resources from these demands (Platteau 2000; Jakiela and Ozier 2012).”
Social Networks, Reputation, and Commitment: Evidence From a Savings Monitors Experiment (2019, background): “Karlan, and W. Yin (2006): “Tying Odysseus to the Mast: Evidence from a Commitment Savings Product in the Philippines,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121, 635 – 72.”
Household Matters: Revisiting the Returns to Capital among Female Microentrepreneurs (2019, background): “1 Existing explanations for the observed gender gap include that women’s profits or working capital are vulnerable to expropriation (de Mel et al., 2009; Jakiela and Ozier, 2016; Fiala, 2018); women are less committed to growing their enterprises or are more impatient (Klapper and Parker, 2011; Fafc”
The Impact of Violence on Individual Risk Preferences: Evidence from a Natural Experiment (2015, methodology): “The CRRA form is also used in this setting in Jakiela and Ozier (2016).”