IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ysm/somwrk/ysm407.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Intrahousehold Resource Allocation in Cote D'Ivoire: Social Norms, Separate Accounts and Consumption Choices

Author

Listed:
  • Christopher R. Udry

    (Yale University, Economic Growth Center)

  • Esther Duflo

    (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Department of Economics)

Abstract

In Cote d'Ivoire, as in much of Africa, husbands and wives farm different crops on separate plots. These different crops are differentially sensitive to particular kinds of rainfall shocks. We find that conditional on overall household expenditure, the composition of expenditure is sensitive to the gender of the recipient of a rainfall shock. For example, rainfall shocks associated with high women's income shift expenditure towards food. Social norms constrain the use of profits from yam cultivation, which is carried out by men. Correspondingly, we find that rainfall-induced fluctuations in income from yams are transmitted to expenditures on education and food, not to expenditures on private goods. We reject the hypothesis of complete insurance within households, even with respect to publicly observable weather shocks. Different sources of income are allocated to different uses depending upon both the identity of the income earner and upon the origin of the income.

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher R. Udry & Esther Duflo, 2004. "Intrahousehold Resource Allocation in Cote D'Ivoire: Social Norms, Separate Accounts and Consumption Choices," Yale School of Management Working Papers ysm407, Yale School of Management.
  • Handle: RePEc:ysm:somwrk:ysm407
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=427064
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Intra-household Allocation; Insurance; Social Norms; Mental Accounts;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D13 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Production and Intrahouse Allocation
    • O12 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development

    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:ysm:somwrk:ysm407. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/smyalus.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.