Cash Transfers, The State and Women Empowerment in South Asia

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Markus Frölich
• Subject Area: Statistics and Econometrics ; Economic Policy, Applied Economics
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 469973409

Cash transfers, a popular policy instrument for poverty reduction and other development goals, are frequently targeted at women. Women constitute a particularly vulnerable group in many developing countries and the gender gap for all development outcomes remains large worldwide due to skewed power relations at both the household and societal levels. In this project, we extend the literature on the effects of cash transfers in order to rigorously investigate their influence on women’s interaction with the state as beneficiaries and women’s decision-making power. The objective is to evaluate Pakistan’s national cash transfer program (Benazir Income Support Program) to estimate (i) the effect of cash transfers on women’s state service use, and two important channels that may mediate this effect: women’s ease of access to services and their trust in the state and (ii) the effect on women’s decision-making power both at household level and at the political level through voting. To this end, we collect primary data through surveys and lab-in-the-field experiments and exploit a discontinuity in individual poverty scores that determine eligibility for the program. This allows us to compare eligible individuals with a score just above and ineligible individuals with a score just below the threshold in a regression discontinuity design (RDD). To understand mechanisms, and go beyond average effects, we complement the analysis by estimating effects for various sub-groups. In this way, we examine whether family structure and initial power relations in the household as well as regional characteristics such as the presence of female politicians, urban/rural locality and political party in power influence the program’s effect. Moreover, we investigate the impact of losing access to the program on excluded and confirmed beneficiaries. This study will be the first to investigate the effect of cash transfers on trust in the state and decision-making power through lab-in-the-field experiments and flash surveys. Moreover, the proposed RDD method constitutes an important methodological improvement over existing literature investigating the effect of cash transfers on observed voting behavior. The extensive heterogeneous effects analysis will allow for a targeted application of the results in policymaking.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants