Article

Intra-household Efficiency in Extended Family Households: Evidence from Rural India

Taylor & Francis
The Journal of Development Studies
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Abstract

The extended family household, in which multiple generations or married siblings of a family live together, is common in developing countries. We conducted a series of public goods experiments in such households in five villages in rural North India to shed light on decision-making efficiency within this household structure. In this experiment, we offered household members the choice to receive either a lower amount over which they have private control or a higher payout that becomes a common resource. We measure efficiency as the degree to which individuals are willing to forego personal rewards for larger, collective rewards. We find that relationships within extended households are not equally efficient, with the relationship between the daughter-in-law and mother-in-law particularly problematic. Supplementary survey and qualitative evidence points to the role of decision-making power, with young, married women lacking the power to assert their preferences in extended households and resorting to actions that reduce the overall efficiency of the household.

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... nuclearized and rely less on extended kin networks (Gupta et al., 2021;Singh, 2003). Keeping that in mind, separate regression models were performed for both urban and rural areas to examine the link between household headship, filial expectancy, and mortality among older widows. ...
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... The intervention and experimental design utilized in this study have been thoroughly documented in Gupta, Ksoll and Maertens (2021), Deshpande et al. (2017), and Deshpande et al. (2023). However, to provide an overview of the trial, we are providing a brief summary below. 2 ...
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... Household decision-making does not have to be conceived of so narrowly, however. The famous 'rotten kid theorem' (Becker, 1974) purports to discuss the conflict between parent and child, while Oreffice (2011) considers intra-household decision-making in same-sex households and Gupta et al. (2021) consider the multiple bilateral relationships in extended families. ...
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... The analysis of intrahousehold resource allocation has been widely explored, with a large body of literature focused on testing the assumptions of conventional household models. The evidence has pointed out in favor of collective models against unitary models (Alderman, Chiappori, Haddad, Hoddinot, & Kanbur, 1995;Himmelweit, Santos, Sevilla, & Sofer, 2013), and the existence of both efficient (Attanasio & Lechene, 2014;Bobonis, 2009) and inefficient outcomes (Gupta, Ksoll, & Maertens, 2021;Hoel, Hidrobo, Bernard, & Ashour, 2017) in the allocative process. Therefore, allocative outcomes might depend on who brings the resources, which resources to bring and who makes the decisions. ...
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Using a carefully designed series of public goods games, we compare, across monogamous and polygynous households, the willingness of husbands and wives to cooperate to maximize household gains. Compared to monogamous husbands and wives, polygynous husbands and wives are less cooperative, one with another, and co-wives are least cooperative, one with another. The husbands’ and wives’ behavior in a corresponding series of inter-household games indicates that these differences cannot be attributed to selection of less cooperative people into polygyny. Finally, behavior in polygynous households is more reciprocal and less apparently altruistic.
Book
Popular Western images of Indian women range from submissive brides behind their veils to the powerful, active women of Indian politics. In this lively and unique book, Patricia and Roger Jeffery present a different perspective on women’s lives. Focusing on the mundane rather than the exotic, they explore the complex interplay between the power of social structures to constrain individuals and the ways women negotiate these constraints to carve out places for themselves.Based on information collected by the authors during their research in villages in Bijnor District, western Uttar Pradesh, the volume offers eight life histories of Hindu and Muslim women. The women’s life histories present a variety of class positions and domestic circumstances, illustrating many aspects of north Indian village life. Interspersed with thematic discussions composed of dialogues, episodes, and songs, the life histories deal with topics of vital concern for women in rural north India: the birth of children, worries about dowry, arranging weddings, sexual politics in marriage, relationships with in-laws, relationships with natal kin, and widowhood.
Article
Using new large-scale, administrative data matching remittances and monthly payroll disbursals, we demonstrate how migrants' earnings in the United Arab Emirates affect their remittances. We consider several types of income changes: Ramadan, weather shocks, a labor reform and returns to time in the UAE. We demonstrate that two key characteristics of the income changes that affect the income elasticity of remittances are the observability of the income and whether the income change is positive or negative. The results are consistent with a private information model where remittances are viewed as payments in an income-sharing contract.
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This paper studies asymmetry of information and transfers within 712 extended family networks from Tanzania. Using cross-reports on asset holdings, we construct measures of misperception of living standards among households within the same network. We contrast altruism, pressure, exchange, and risk sharing as motives to transfer in simple models with asymmetric information. Testing the model predictions in the data uncovers the active role played by recipients of transfers. Our findings suggest that recipients set the terms of the transfers, either by exerting pressure on donors or because they hold substantial bargaining power in their exchange relationships. © 2019 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.
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Experiments with family groups are rare, but since many decisions are taken at the household level or occur within the household it is an important area to investigate. This paper provides a survey of the recent experimental work on intra-household decision-making. I discuss some of the challenges involved in doing experiments with couples and families and consider major areas that remain yet to be explored. While general themes from the research are still emerging, four results repeatedly occur: (1) the absence of efficiency in intra-household decisions; (2) joint decisions that are not a convex combination of individual decisions; (3) individual behaviour is affected by opportunities for hiding actions from spouses and (4) deviations from standard models of microeconomics in line with those seen in the anomalies literature of individual decision-making.
Article
Whereas the extended family plays a central role in many models of economic behavior, particularly in developing countries, there is a paucity of empirical evidence on the extent and nature of resource sharing among non coresident family members. This is in sharp contrast with abundant evidence that the distribution of resources within households predicts household spending and savings patterns. To fill this gap, the collective model of household decision-making is extended to the family. The model is particularly appealing in this context because it places few restrictions on preferences of individual family members who may or may not be coresident and does not specify a specific bargaining mechanism that underlies negotiations. The model yields empirical tests of whether the behavior of family members is (Pareto) efficient. Evidence is presented on the relationship between three distinct measures of health- and education-related human capital of children and the distribution of wealth among extended family members using rich longitudinal survey data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS). The data are ideally suited for this research because the survey follows family members when they leave the family home and detailed information about individual-specific wealth is collected. We find that child human capital outcomes are affected by wealth of non coresident family members indicating that extended families do share resources. While the special case of the model in which all members are completely altruistic is rejected, the restrictions of the efficient model are not rejected, indicating that non co-resident family members are able to co-ordinate allocation decisions in such a way as to make no family member better off without another member being worse off.
Article
In the absence of well-developed markets for credit and insurance, extended families play a major role as a traditional system of mutual help. However these arrangements have important consequences on economic choices. In this paper, we use first hand data from Western Cameroon to explore this question. We find that the large majority of transfers follow a given pattern whereby elder siblings support their younger siblings in the early stages of their lives who in turn reciprocate by supporting their elder siblings when they have children. We interpret this pattern as a generalised system of reciprocal credit within the extended family. We propose a simple overlapping generation model to investigate its welfare properties. We then explore the implications of this pattern on labour market outcomes and find evidence of large disincentive effects. This pattern of transfers also implies that younger siblings are more educated but have fewer and less educated children.
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We posit that household decision-making over fertility is characterized by moral hazard since most contraception can only be perfectly observed by the woman. Using an experiment in Zambia that varied whether women were given access to contraceptives alone or with their husbands, we find that women given access with their husbands were 19 percent less likely to seek family planning services, 25 percent less likely to use concealable contraception, and 27 percent more likely to give birth. However, women given access to contraception alone report a lower subjective well-being, suggesting a psychosocial cost of making contraceptives more concealable.
Article
Joint household structures in which several generations co-reside in a single house are common across developing countries. Such households may confer benefits on all the family members through household public goods with the patriarch exercising greater control over resources. Therefore, the household structure may affect the bargaining power of its members. This paper estimates the effect of joint versus nuclear household structure in India on the autonomy of women and their labour force participation and the heterogeneity in the effects by income, caste, and region. I use an instrumental variable approach and find that women living in nuclear households have greater decision-making power.
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How are resources allocated within extended families in developing economies? This question is investigated using a unique social experiment: the South African pension program. Under that program the elderly receive a cash transfer equal to roughly twice the per capita income of Africans in South Africa. The study examines how this transfer affects the labor supply of prime‐age individuals living with these elderly in extended families. It finds a sharp drop in the working hours of prime‐age individuals in these households when women turn 60 years old or men turn 65, the ages at which they become eligible for pensions. It also finds that the drop in labor supply is much larger when the pensioner is a woman, suggesting an imperfect pooling of resources. The allocation of resources among prime‐age individuals depends strongly on their absolute age and gender as well as on their relative age. The oldest son in the household reduces his working hours more than any other prime‐age household member.
Article
I present results from the first trust game conducted among married couples. The experiment consisted of a one-shot trust game where spouses were taken into separate rooms, not allowed to communicate, given a significant endowment, and both strategies and payoffs were common knowledge. Results indicate that only 3 percent of spouses in the sender role transfer the entire amount; the average proportion sent is 57 percent of the endowment. The limited sending is costly because the household on average is walking away with half of the potential earnings. The results provide further evidence of the lack of Pareto Efficiency within the household.
Article
We conducted a field experiment in Southern Ghana to test the effect of asymmetric information on intrahousehold allocation. A lottery was conducted, where prizes were distributed in public and in private. The results indicate that asymmetric information over windfalls has a differential effect on observable and concealable expenses, consistent with hiding. Husbands' public windfalls increase investment in assets and social capital, while there is no such effect when wives win. Private windfalls of both spouses are committed to cash (wives) or in-kind gifts (husband) which are either difficult to monitor or to reverse if discovered by the other spouse.
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In Sub-Saharan African farm households, two types of plot management often coexist: collective fields are farmed jointly by household members under the authority of the head while individual plots are autonomously managed by members. In this paper we explore the productivity differentials between collective and individual plots in the context of extended family farms. We find that land yields are significantly larger on male private plots than on common plots after all appropriate controls have been included. Yet, the disadvantage of common plots exists only for care intensive crops and for cash crops. We provide evidence that the yield differentials stem from labor incentive problems. They may arise from the prevailing reward function and/or from preference heterogeneity over the use of the proceeds from the collective field.
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This paper considers the relationship between international migration and gender discrimination through the lens of decision-making power over intrahousehold resource allocation. The endogeneity of migration is addressed with a difference-in-differences style identification strategy and a model with household fixed effects. The results suggest that while a migrant household head is away, a greater share of resources is spent on girls relative to boys and his spouse commands greater decision-making power. Once the head returns home, however, a greater share of resources goes to boys, and there is suggestive evidence of greater authority for the head of household.
Article
An ongoing research project in an area of nine villages in south India provided the opportunity for studying the circumstances leading to the formation of families of different types and for determining whether the incidence of families of different types was changing. Methodological experimentation with a quasi-anthropological approach to demographic data collection, together with the employment of village censuses and small sharply focused surveys, permitted the full histories of family formation and partition to be obtained. It was found that the society had long been characterized by both stem and nuclear families, the existence of one type necessitating the other, and that there was still little evidence of transition in family type. Furthermore, in terms of caste and socioeconomic characteristics, the society was remarkably homogeneous. There are no fixed rules for the timing or nature of household partition. However, the internal nature of the family and its relationships are changing: there is a growing concept of the immaturity of children, while the adolescents within the household are increasingly likely to be daughters rather than daughters-in-law.
Article
This paper critically examines hypothesized trends towards the conjugal family in India. The author offers empirical evidence on the involvement of family members and outside kin in decision-making in nuclear, joint, and extended households, as well as upon attitudes towards the joint family on the part of a sample of 118 adult respondents from families of children from two schools in Ahmedabad, India. Among the nuclear households, in about half the cases, nonresidential family members were involved with decisions of respondents's family members. It was also found that the overwhelming majority of respondents from nuclear, extended and joint households and from various socioeconomic strata (upper and middle class) were in favor of the joint family. Other trends which have been interpreted as supporting movements towards the Western model of the conjugal family have been critically examined. These trends are also consistent with another model of the family, tentatively titled "The Adaptive Extended Family."
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Joint land rights in peasant communities are often held to preserve cooperation norms better than individual land rights. This study uses contributions in public goods experiments as a measure of cooperation norms in 15 jointly- or individually-owned peasant communities in the Peruvian Andes. Cooperation norms are significantly stronger in joint-ownership communities, when controlling for relevant exogenous variables. This effect is found only among men, who are considered the main landholders in a household and are thus more likely to respond to the incentives provided by the land right system.
Article
This article measures the economic impacts of social pressure to share income with kin and neighbours in rural Kenyan villages. We conduct a lab experiment in which we randomly vary the observability of investment returns to test whether subjects reduce their income in order to keep it hidden. We find that women adopt an investment strategy that conceals the size of their initial endowment in the experiment, though that strategy reduces their expected earnings. This effect is largest among women with relatives attending the experiment. Parameter estimates suggest that women anticipate that observable income will be “taxed” at a rate above 4%; this effective tax rate nearly doubles when kin can observe income directly. At the village level, we find an association between the willingness to forgo expected return to keep income hidden in the laboratory experiment and worse economic outcomes outside the laboratory.
Article
Beginning with a brief geographical, historical, cultural, and religious overview of India and her people, this article then presents a summary of family life in the contemporary Hindu family. The family strengths that are unique and based on deep-rooted religious, cultural, and social values that have been in existence and integral to the Hindu family for multiple generations are then outlined. The article also summarizes some challenges that families have to contend with in day-to-day living situations.
Article
The aim of this article is to gauge the size of the educational gap between children, aged 8–11 years, belonging to the different social groups in India. It is well established that educational attainments vary considerably between India's caste and religious groups with Muslims, Dalits (the Scheduled Castes), Adivasis (the Scheduled Tribes), and the ‘Other Backward Classes’ (the OBC) being the most backward. Using data from the Indian Human Development Survey of 2005 – which tested over 12,300 children, aged 8–11, for their ability to read, write, and do arithmetic at different levels of competence – this study examines inequalities within social groups in the test scores of children to argue that inter-group comparisons of educational attainment should take into account not just the mean level of achievement of the children in a group but, also, the degree of inequality in the distribution of achievements between children in the group. The article then proceeds to enquire why different children have different levels of educational achievement. The central conclusion is that, after controlling for a number of parental, household and school-related factors, children from all the different social groups, when compared to Brahmin children, were disadvantaged, in some or all of the three competencies of reading, arithmetic, and writing. However, this disadvantage was greatest for Muslim, Dalit, and Adivasi children. These children were disadvantaged with respect to all three competencies and their disadvantage embraced failure as well as success. Using a decomposition analysis, the article quantifies the ‘structural advantage’ that Brahmin and High Caste children enjoyed over their Dalit and Muslim counterparts.
Article
This study uses data from recent household surveys in 43 developing countries to describe the main dimensions of household size and composition in the developing world. Average household size varies only modestly among regions, ranging from 5.6 in the Near East/North Africa to 4.8 in Latin America. These averages are similar to levels observed in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe and North America. About four out of five members of the household are part of the nuclear family of the head of the household. Household size is found to be positively associated with the level of fertility and the mean age at marriage, and inversely associated with the level of marital disruption. An analysis of trends and differentials in household size suggests that convergence to smaller and predominantly nuclear households is proceeding slowly in contemporary developing countries.
Article
BOOK REVIEWS- SOUTH ASIA is a lack of specificity of where the informacion comes from, for example, which region, which village, which fescival, etc. However, chis is not crue of the latter three chapters, Tamil Nadu: Guardians of Boundaries, Uctar Pradesh: Gifts of Elephants, and Orissa: Temples forTulasi, which focus on detailed case studies of three pottery families. Here is the detailed contextual knowledge the reader aches for in the first four chapters, where the pots go and what they end up doing in specific cultural contexts and how potters describe what they do. Each chapter centers on one potter and his family, with the potter's voice articulacing his ritual, economic, and arciscic hopes. Also, there is a beautiful series of phocographs showing in detailed seeps how pottery is made in each of chese regions. I was especially intrigued by che unusual chapcer on Tulasi temples in Orissa, and the description of terracotta planter shrines for the tulasi plane, che Indian basil. However, the lack of a conclusion leaves the reader hanging uncomfortably at the end of the book. As a whole, chis book should be received wich high interest by arc and crafc historians, anchcopologists of art, and artiscs (especially potters) who have South Asia as a focus. Detailed footnotes and bibliography complement the photographs and text and make it a useful companion to students embarking on a contextual understanding of pottery in India. For chose who have traveled in the Indian countryside and have seen the flumes of smoke coming from scattered small mounds scacked and layered with old broken potsherds, this book will be richly rewarding. VIJAYA NAGARAJAN University of California, Berkeley Don't Marry Me to a PlO'wman! Women's Everyday Lives in Rural North India. By PATRICIA JEFFERY and ROGER JEFFERY. Boulder, Colo.: Wescview, 1996. viii, 294 pp. 62.00(doth);62.00 (doth); 19.95 (paper). The Jefferys are well known for their previous publications on rural Uttar Pradesh and urban Delhi, for solid quantitative and qualitative ethnographic work. Here, the preface and introduction cell us, they are experimenting with che storytelling genre, and their chief concern is with women's agency as they present women's life stories from two villages in U.P. They discuss indigenous words for agency or autonomy and the ways in which women being in control or having responsibility is problematic, given that women differ from other subalterns in having rather greater stakes in the system, at least in the long term (p. 18). There is no real attempt co invescigace this assertion comparatively in this book, or for that matter to better investigate the system, although the overwhelming impression one gets from their rich data on women's lives lends credence to the observation if the family is the system they mean. The design of the book is complex. It alternates eight long stories, about four Muslim and four Hindu women, with thematically organized interludes of songs and accounts (p. 3). The chapters are also organized topically, with sections focused on childbearing, marriage arrangement, marital careers, relationships with natal kin, and, finally, widowhood. For the long stories, the Jefferys tried co choose ordinary women, ones whose lives are both unique and also representative of women's experiences in rural northern India.
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Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of the theories of the family, and discusses the household technology and utility possibility frontiers, decision-making in the family, theories of the marriage and household membership, and interdependent preferences within families. An important conceptual building block for economic theories of marriage is the utility possibility frontier that any couple would face, if they were to marry each other. It is a consequence of the second fundamental theorem of welfare economics that if preferences are convex and there are no consumption externalities, then any household that allocates marketable private goods among its members will act as if each household member is given a personal income and is allowed to spend it as he or she wishes. Although the problem of benefit–cost analysis of household public goods in benevolent families seems interesting and important, it does not seem to have received much attention in the literature.