Gender differences and social ties effects in resource sharing

In rural areas in developing countries gender inequality tends to be severe which might have substantial welfare implications if it determines how scarce economic resources are shared between men and women. Therefore, it is important to know how gender influences resource sharing and - given the strong embeddedness of resource sharing in social networks - in what ways social ties interact with this influence. To investigate this, we combine data from resource allocation experiments and a social network survey in rural Nicaragua. We find that women share less than men, and that this difference is largest among people of the same village and of different gender. We also find that social ties exert an important influence on sharing and that women have fewer friendship ties within their village than men. Regression analysis shows important gender differences in the effect of social ties on sharing. While both men and women share more with female friends than with female non-friends, women share less with male friends than with male non-friends. We also find that with controls for friendship ties, there remains a direct gender effect on within-village sharing, with men sharing more than women. Finally, we find that our results are robust to potential gender differences in the reporting of social ties.