IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/csa/wpaper/2010-20.html

Are gifts and loans between households voluntary?

Author

Listed:
  • Margherita Comola
  • Marcel Fafchamps

Abstract

Using village date from Tanzania, we test whether gifts and loans between households are voluntary while correcting for mis-reporting by the giving and receiving households. Tow maintained assumptions underlie our analysis: answers to a question on who people would turn to for help are good proxies for willingness to link: and, conditional on regressors, the probability of reporting a gift or loan is independent between giving and receiving households. Building on these assumptions, we develop a new estimation methodology and gift giving are voluntary, then both households should, want to rely on each other for help. We find only weak evidence to support bilateral formation. We do, however, find reasonably strong evidence to support unilateral link formation. Results suggest that if a household wishes to enter in a reciprocal relationship with someone who is sufficiently close socially and geographically, it can do so unilaterally.

Suggested Citation

  • Margherita Comola & Marcel Fafchamps, 2010. "Are gifts and loans between households voluntary?," CSAE Working Paper Series 2010-20, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.
    • Handle: RePEc:csa:wpaper:2010-20
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9b228fbc-f6ba-4a55-963a-9586654d8b92
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. repec:dau:papers:123456789/12203 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Goldberg, Jessica, 2017. "The effect of social pressure on expenditures in Malawi," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 143(C), pages 173-185.
    3. Christophe Nordman & Julia Vaillant, 2013. "Inputs, Gender Roles or Sharing Norms? Assessing the Gender Performance Gap Among Informal Entrepreneurs in Madagascar," Working Papers DT/2013/15, DIAL (Développement, Institutions et Mondialisation).
    4. Pamela Jakiela & Owen Ozier, 2016. "Does Africa Need a Rotten Kin Theorem? Experimental Evidence from Village Economies," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 83(1), pages 231-268.
    5. Landmann, Andreas & Vollan, Björn & Henning, Karla & Frölich, Markus, 2020. "Crowding-Out or Crowding-In? Heterogeneous Effects of Insurance on Solidarity," IZA Discussion Papers 13688, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    6. Landmann, Andreas & Vollan, Björn & Frölich, Markus, 2012. "Insurance versus Savings for the Poor: Why One Should Offer Either Both or None," IZA Discussion Papers 6298, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    7. Comola, Margherita & Prina, Silvia, 2014. "Do Interventions Change the Network? A Panel Peer-Effect Model Accounting for Endogenous Network Changes," IZA Discussion Papers 8641, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    8. Landmann, Andreas & Vollan, Björn & Frölich, Markus, 2011. "Saving, Microinsurance: Why You Should Do Both or Nothing. A Behavioral Experiment on the Philippines," Proceedings of the German Development Economics Conference, Berlin 2011 51, Verein für Socialpolitik, Research Committee Development Economics.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C13 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Estimation: General
    • C51 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Model Construction and Estimation
    • D85 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Network Formation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:csa:wpaper:2010-20. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Julia Coffey (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/csaoxuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.