Sticky Intra-household Resource Allocation in the Face of Technological Change: Evidence from a Framed Field Experiment in Mozambique

Although new agricultural technologies are widely expected to enhance the productivity of rural households, evidence on how households reallocate resources to capitalize on these innovations is limited. To explore how households respond to a profitable, but risky new technology, I conduct a framed field experiment played with maize growing couples that simulates the exchange of labor and income in Mozambican households. When presented with a familiar local maize variety that is relatively insensitive to the wife’s labor input, households allocate labor to husbands’ maize production fairly efficiently. But when faced with an improved maize variety whose higher returns would induce cooperative households to increase maize labor, couples forego 17% of expected cooperative income. Analysis of husbands’ income sharing rules reveals that wives would have received just 23% of the productivity gains that would have accrued to households, had they allocated their labor so as to fully exploit the New technology, and would have borne 2.4 times the downside risk faced by husbands. These results suggest that stickiness in intra-household income sharing may dampen the reallocation of productive resources in households that adopt profitable new technologies. Novel empirical evidence on real life intra-household income sharing from sample communities corroborates key findings from the game.