COVID-19, Crises, and Women’s Control of Resources: Evidence from Mexico

This paper examines the relationship between crises and the intrahousehold allocation of resources. Using data from Mexico, I estimate a structural collective model to identify the distribution of household resources among its members. Then, I construct a proxy for women’s bargaining power on the basis of their control of resources and document how it evolves over periods of economic stability and contraction. The results indicate that during the COVID-19 crisis, women’s control over household resources declined by approximately 4–5 percentage points compared with non-recession periods and by 6–8 percentage points relative to the financial crisis, with a more pronounced effect for households with children. I further analyze how this resource reallocation affects individual poverty. The findings highlight the heterogeneous behavior of intrahousehold inequality over the business cycle. They also suggest that the hypothesis that the financial crisis was a “man-cession” and the COVID-19 crisis was a “she-cession” holds in terms of intrahousehold resource allocation.