Marcela Ibanez, Ghida Karbala

Can health information campaigns unintentionally generate cognitive load and affect the behavioral preferences of beneficiaries? We study this question by implementing a field experiment with a representative sample of adult individuals residing in Cairo, Egypt. Participants in a door-to-door survey watched videos about a commonly spread and highly contagious disease affecting children or a placebo video. Consistent with dual-process theories, we find that the health awareness video impaired cognition of the targeted population in terms of lower scores on cognitive ability and fluid intelligence tests than the control group. The results show that participants who experienced financial and health stress in their daily life were mostly affected by the treatment. The findings emphasize the need to consider cognitive taxation when designing informational campaigns and to determine target beneficiaries.

Ghida Karbala, Marcela Ibanez, Gerhard Riener

Freedom of choice is a fundamental aspect of individuals’ social, economic, and political lives. Despite the significant value attached to the freedom of choice, some societies de facto restrict the right to decide to men while women assume a subordinate role. We investigate whether men and women attach different intrinsic values to decision rights and test whether preferences for forfeiting agency depend on social norms. The results show that married women paired with their spouse have significantly lower willingness to retain the right to decide on resource allocation over a joint income than when paired with strangers. Elicited beliefs regarding the partner’s desire to maintain decision rights show that married women behave in a way consistent with the expectations of the spouse and the general cultural setting persisting in Egypt. Results suggest that in the presence of prescribed social identities and well-defined gender roles, outcomes, as expected by the standard bargaining models, fail to prevail. These models are incomplete without considering internal constraints to agency that are largely shaped by the existing cultural setting.

Debosree Banerjee, Marcela Ibanez, Gerhard Riener and Meike Wollni

Societies where individuals are willing to sanction anti-social behavior, can escape the tragedy of the commons and sustain cooperation. Free-riding in the enforcement of social norms is a reason for decay cooperation within society. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how to mobilize participation in norm enforcement and what impedes certain groups from participating in norm enforcement. This paper investigates the supply-side factors that affect the willingness to act as a "third-party punisher." We trace the origin of gender gaps in norm enforcement comparing societies that differ in women's economic empowerment. We find that nurture as opposed to nature can explain the gender gap in selection as third party punisher. In the matrilineal Khasi tribes, where women have higher economic empowerment (enjoy inheritance rights), women are more willing to act as third-party punishers than men. In contrast, the opposite is true in the patrilineal Santal Tribes in India, where women have restricted economic freedom. Our results indicate that changes in the institutional environment can promote gender equity. In particular, anonymity and reduced retaliation possibilities close the gender gap in the willingness to act as a third-party punisher.

Pooja Balasubramanian, Marcela Ibanez Diaz, Sarah Khan and Soham Sahoo

This paper investigates how women's economic empowerment interventions have affected human development in low- and middle-income countries. We use a meta-regression analysis to consider the following dimensions of human development: income and wealth, education, health, and community development. After an extensive search of academic and policy-focused databases and screening of 2998 titles and abstracts of published studies and working papers, 48 studies on female economic empowerment were selected and included in the analysis. We find programs that promote female economic empowerment lead to a modest but significant positive effect on employment, income, assets, school attendance, and expenditures in health but have no significant impact on community development. Regarding the pathways by which women's economic empowerment leads to human development, there are positive effects on income security (i.e., beneficiaries are more likely insured) and consumption expenditures. However, there are no significant effects on intra-household bargaining power or fertility. Our findings show economic empowerment to be associated with worse outcomes for women in terms of health compared with other household members, providing evidence of a triple burden of work for women.