Women's Power, Conditional Cash Transfers, and Schooling in Nicaragua

By S. Gitter, B. Barham. 2008

171 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Social Safety Net (Red de Proteccion 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.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/87d1e2b69631f40770056447209478a2352e030a

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Citations in the corpus

What We Learn about Girls’ Education from Interventions That Do Not Focus on Girls (2019, background): “4 The 10 reviews are: Conn (2014), Glewwe et al. (2014), Kremer et al.”
The Impact of Economic Resource Transfers to Women Versus Men (2012, methodology): “*Gitter S, Barham B (2008) Women’s power, conditional cash transfers, and schooling in Nicaragua.”
Does female empowerment promote economic development? (2011, unknown): “The two spouses have separate budget constraints, and (following the standard noncooperative model of the household) the provision of public goods is determined as a Nash equilibrium between the spouses.”
What determines female autonomy? Evidence from Bangladesh (2009, background): “For evidence from Nicaragua suggesting that excessive bargaining power for women may reduce educational expenses on children, see Gitter and Barham (2008).”