Household Matters: Revisiting the Returns to Capital among Female Microentrepreneurs

By A. Bernhardt, Erica M. Field, Rohini Pande, Natalia Rigol. American Economic Review: Insights, 2019

129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Multiple field experiments report positive financial returns to capital shocks for male and not female microentrepreneurs. But these analyses overlook the fact that female entrepreneurs often reside with male entrepreneurs. Using data from experiments in India, Sri Lanka, and Ghana, we show that the observed gender gap in microenterprise responses does not reflect lower returns on investment, when measured at the household level. Instead, the absence of a profit response among female-run enterprises reflects the fact that women’s capital is typically invested into their husband’s enterprise. We cannot reject equivalence of household-level income gains for male and female capital shock recipients. (JEL G31, J16, L25, L26, O12, O16)

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5799f0a29c9e906f6e1191b825f0880e8439e033

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

Citations in the corpus

The effects of cash transfers on adult labor market outcomes (2018, background): “Bianchi and Bobba (2013) find that expected future transfers increase the probability of entrepreneurship (self-employment) in the short run.”
Social Norms as a Barrier to Women’s Employment in Developing Countries (2020, background): “Bernhardt et al. (2019) systematically examine whether the ﬁnding that women have a lower return to capital than men can be explained by these intrahousehold dynamics.”