Achieving gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls is one of the 17 sustainable development goals of the United Nation. Beliefs about women's roles in society or the home often make achieving these goals challenging. Despite how entrenched beliefs about gender may be today, evidence suggests that beliefs may partially be a cultural by-product of idiosyncratic historical conditions. For example, the historical reliance on plow agriculture may have caused women to specialize in household production (Alesina et al., 2013), or reliance on pastoralism may have led some societies to develop practices to restrict women's sexuality (Becker, 2019). This raises the following question – can this process work in reverse? In other words, can external conditions or shocks also cause gender norms to
We use panel data on rural Nepali households to study how a husband's migration interacts with intrahousehold decision-making power and expenditure decisions within households over time. We show that during migration spells, decision-making power (both sole and joint) shifts from a husband to his wife. The shift is large and represents 10% of total decisions. In the Nepali context, this is not an
When decisions shift to the wife, we provide evidence that households decrease their spending on temptation goods (alcohol and tobacco products) by 105–120%. We provide some evidence that this reduction is offset by increased spending on children's education and clothing, although we interpret those results with some caution. Insofar as these reallocations are caused by the shift in decision-making power, this demonstrates how altering gender roles in decision-making could have meaningful economic impacts on developing countries.
Of course, such a change in spending habits could easily be attributed to an income effect. Higher wages motivate migration, and labor market or migration frictions likely mean that substantial wage arbitrage opportunities persist across locations. Naturally, we find that migration spells increase household income. To assess whether the spending changes are attributable to an income effect or changes in decision-making power, we exploit the fact that many households allow their sons to migrate. Although sending sons for migrant work increases household income, we do not observe changes in decision-making power or shifts in expenditures similar to the ones when husbands migrate. This suggests that the shifts in expenditures that occur when husbands migrate is specific to the migration of a
Women's decision-making power is a key component of women's economic empowerment. Kabeer (1999) defines empowerment as the process by which people expand their ability to make strategic life choices, particularly in contexts in which this ability had been denied to them. Therefore, decision-making power is an important outcome in and of itself: if male migration triggers women's participation in household decision-making, then women's empowerment could be an important welfare implication of migration.
Moreover, decision-making may mediate other outcomes, such as how the household spends money. If women gain meaningful decision-making power, then assuming the husband and wife do not share identical preferences, we also expect changes in household economic decisions. In fact, many programs target female beneficiaries based on an expectation that women prefer to invest more in children (Duflo, 2012; Handa, 1996; Hoddinott and Haddad, 1995; Thomas, 1990), and specifically girls (Duflo, 2003; Qian, 2008; Thomas, 1990, 1994). Along these lines, several studies have demonstrated increased investment in children's education following migration (Antman, 2011, 2012; Edwards and Ureta, 2003; Yang, 2008), This finding is not universal: e.g., McKenzie and Rapoport (2011) provide evidence of reduced educational attainment among migrant households in Mexico.
Our work lies at the intersection of literature on gender and migration. Much of the work at this intersection studies how female migration interacts with women's agency and gender inequality (e.g., Hughes, 2019; Parrado et al., 2005; Stecklov et al., 2010; Sultana and Fatima, 2017). Our results specifically contribute to a growing literature studying how migration affects household decision-making among female family members left behind. Clemens and Tiongson (2017) exploit a natural experiment and use a regression discontinuity design to show that when household members migrate from the Philippines to Korea, women take on greater responsibility for household decisions. Furthermore, they spend more on education, health, and quality-of-life goods (e.g., ceremonies); they also borrow less, save more, and are more likely to send children to private school and visit private clinics. They present suggestive evidence that these effects work through not only remittances but a change in household decision-making power. Antman (2015) finds a similar pattern in Mexico: decision-making power shifts in favor of the spouse left behind during a migration spell, and the household tendency to devote a larger share of resources to girls rather than boys during this period. In contrast to these findings, Göbel (2013) finds no evidence of differences in how female- and male-headed households spend remittances that their migrant spouses send home. Other work has highlighted that geographic separation could introduce asymmetric information about household decisions, therefore allowing the wife to make
A concern in interpreting our results is that migration is not a randomly assigned event: households select into migration. Moreover, this decision may be correlated with other factors that also affect household decision-making or finances. For example, one concern may be that households selecting into migration are more likely to see changes in decision-making power, i.e., migrant households are more open to adopting more-equitable norms. Past work suggests that, if anything, the bias goes the opposite way. Nobles and McKelvey (2015) find that when women are more in control of household resources, husbands are less likely to migrate. This suggests that households in which the husband migrates are not likely to be the type of households in which women's empowerment grows over time; in fact, they may be the opposite type of household, thus working against our results.
We address these issues in several ways. Similar to Antman (2015), our main empirical approach uses household fixed effects (FE) and thus compares households to themselves over time as the husband's migration status changes. This approach controls for any unobserved time-invariant differences among households. Selection into migration – likely on the basis of youth, earnings potential, risk tolerance, or other unobservables that could easily affect our outcomes – will be controlled for by these FE. Moreover, we include a specification whereby we limit our sample to households in which the husband migrates at some point, therefore conditioning on selection into current/eventual migration (so only selection into the
Our novel contribution to this literature is to highlight the potential for
We show how these persistent effects can be explained by a habit-formation model (e.g., Becker and Murphy, 1998). Migration disrupts the household's usual decision-making process, which necessitates that the household form new habits. During this time, the household “learns by doing” – e.g., couples may realize that women are indeed capable of making financial decisions. Preferences slowly change over who makes decisions, and the new habit of more-equitable decision-making starts to stick. The longer a migrant stays away, the more likely this habit forms. Consistent with this narrative, we find that the contemporaneous changes in decision-making power are concentrated in households that experience In addition, as we discuss, Nepali migrant destinations are not likely to be places with less extreme gender norms.
Identifying the habit-formation mechanism broadens the policy impact of our paper by illustrating how exactly could policies be designed to improve women's empowerment. This contributes to a growing literature studying how policies can be effectively designed to change pervasive gender norms. For example, correcting individual beliefs about others’ privately held beliefs on gender may lead to less distortion of female labor supply in Saudi Arabia (Bursztyn et al., 2020). Similarly, giving women individual bank accounts, therefore incentivizing them to work, may indirectly change gender norms (Field et al., 2021). Our work suggests a new mechanism that policies aimed at similar goals could apply: promoting learning and habit formation through a temporary disruption in the decision-making process may facilitate long-term cultural change.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. We begin, in Section 2, with a description of the unique Nepali context and our data, which underscores the policy relevance of our analysis. In Section 3, we present our main empirical strategy and discuss our identifying assumptions. Results are presented in Section 4. In Section 5, we discuss how our results can be explained by a model of habit formation. We close in Section 6 with some concluding remarks.
The relationship between migration and gender norms is of considerable interest in Nepal and throughout much of South Asia. In 2015, remittances made up >30% of Nepali gross domestic product (GDP) – a share considerably higher than in most countries (World Bank Group, 2018). As a South Asian country, Nepal is home to gender norms that often constrain women's opportunities in the labor market, education, or autonomy over decisions (Asian Development Bank [ADB], 2010). See Jayachandran (2015) for a review of how gender norms, especially those present in South Asia, might explain gender inequality. 43% of the households in our sample are interviewed in all four rounds, while the remaining are interviewed for only two (41%) or three (15%) rounds. Some of this attrition is because surveyors were unable to locate the household (or reinterview the baseline respondent), while some attrition occurs because households were purposefully dropped from the sample. Regardless of the reason for attrition, there is little evidence that attrition systematically changed the composition of the groups we compare. See Section E of the Appendix for details.
Our main data source is the “Heifer Nepal Smallholders in Livestock Value Chain” impact evaluation panel survey data collected in 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018 from rural Nepali households residing in communities across seven districts (see Figure A1 in the Appendix for a map). In each round of the survey, female respondents were asked about household demographics and finances, economic activity including migration status of household members, and economic decision-making. We include only those households in which a married, female respondent was interviewed in the first round and at least one other time. Our full sample is an unbalanced panel of 2,508 households.4
The survey data were collected for the evaluation of a livestock transfer program. Details of the randomized program evaluation process are provided by Janzen, et al. (2018). One concern may be that this program affected migration, leading us to conflate migration spells with program treatment effects. However, the treatment is not correlated with the decision to migrate, mitigating this concern. The correlation coefficient between a randomized treatment dummy and a dummy variable indicating that the husband migrated in the last year of our data is 0.01. Results of the specifications including the treatment dummy variables and interactions are available from the authors upon request.
In 2017–2018, remittances made up nearly 28% of sample households’ income, highlighting the extent to which many families in our sample depend on migrant work. Data on remittances from 2014 and 2016 are unavailable. Over the course of 10 years, households in the rural parts of the seven districts represented in our sample report having had 1.8 migrants on average, and 54% of households report at least one person migrating at some point. These estimates are nearly the same as in our sample, despite covering twice as many years.
Migrants are defined as household members not currently residing at home. Data from the final three survey rounds indicates that 96% of husbands not currently residing at home listed “migrated for work” as their purpose for leaving, suggesting that this is a good indicator of migration. Respondents were not asked about the purpose of residing outside the home in the first survey round, which is why we use the proposed indicator instead of restricting the analysis to only those who migrated for work. Section D in the Appendix shows that our results are robust when we restrict our definition to only include migrants who are residing outside of Nepal and for >6 months, who are even more likely to be migrating for work. We only know whether the destination is the Middle East, Far East, or another country.
Table 1 provides further context by illustrating what sorts of characteristics correlate with the decision to migrate. We report the overall sample mean and then disaggregate means by whether the husband has migrated at least once during the observed periods (“ever migrate”) or not (“never migrate”). Migrant husbands are younger, more educated, and more likely to be literate than husbands who are not observed as migrants at any time in the data. Similarly, the wives of migrant men are younger, more educated, and more likely to be literate than wives of husbands who remain at home. These differences highlight the importance of an empirical strategy that controls for selection into migration or, more broadly, differences between migrant and nonmigrant households.
Characteristics by migrant status
Age | 46.119 | 38.934 | 50.720 | 0.000*** |
[12.921] | [9.339] | [12.800] | ||
Years of education | 5.104 | 6.219 | 4.391 | 0.000*** |
[3.940] | [3.517] | [4.030] | ||
Can read or write | 0.763 | 0.877 | 0.690 | 0.000*** |
[0.365] | [0.270] | [0.398] | ||
Age | 41.650 | 35.076 | 45.859 | 0.000*** |
[12.143] | [9.016] | [12.020] | ||
Years of education | 2.513 | 3.770 | 1.708 | 0.000*** |
[3.545] | [3.790] | [3.125] | ||
Can read or write | 0.527 | 0.677 | 0.431 | 0.000*** |
[0.401] | [0.369] | [0.391] | ||
N | 2,508 | 979 | 1,529 | 2,508 |
No. of resident household members | 3.483 | 3.629 | 3.386 | 0.000*** |
[1.854] | [1.745] | [1.916] | ||
Resident mother-in-law | 0.230 | 0.316 | 0.174 | 0.000*** |
[0.421] | [0.465] | [0.379] | ||
Resident father-in-law | 0.159 | 0.232 | 0.110 | 0.000*** |
[0.365] | [0.422] | [0.313] | ||
Resident daughter-in-law | 0.185 | 0.084 | 0.251 | 0.000*** |
[0.388] | [0.277] | [0.434] | ||
Natural disaster (nonearthquake) | 0.044 | 0.039 | 0.047 | 0.092* |
[0.206] | [0.194] | [0.213] | ||
Serious illness | 0.223 | 0.213 | 0.230 | 0.074* |
[0.416] | [0.409] | [0.421] | ||
Death of household member | 0.055 | 0.053 | 0.056 | 0.630 |
[0.228] | [0.225] | [0.230] | ||
Falling agricultural prices | 0.131 | 0.109 | 0.146 | 0.000*** |
[0.338] | [0.312] | [0.353] | ||
Decrease in income | 0.155 | 0.134 | 0.170 | 0.000*** |
[0.362] | [0.341] | [0.375] | ||
Loss of employment | 0.023 | 0.020 | 0.025 | 0.178 |
[0.151] | [0.141] | [0.156] | ||
Mercalli scale 2015 earthquake | 6.926 | 6.870 | 6.962 | 0.000*** |
[0.505] | [0.525] | [0.488] | ||
7,572 | 3,013 | 4,559 | 7,572 |
Given that migrants are younger on average than those who do not migrate, it is unsurprising that migrants are also more likely to have a resident mother-in-law or father in-law. Households with recent migrants are mechanically younger; so, likewise, it is unsurprising that they are more likely to be in joint households than future/current migrants. Joint households, where young couples live with the husband's parents, are common in Nepal. Qualitative research has shown that joint households in South Asian contexts are typically headed first by the father-in-law, or in the case of his absence – his wife, their son, and finally, the son's wife (e.g., Bloom et al., 2001). This highlights the theoretical ambiguity of the impact of a husband's migration on his wife's decision-making power, since men may easily transfer decision-making power to their parents rather than their wives.
Negative economic shocks could push individuals to migrate (Shrestha, 2017) or could prevent individuals from migrating if doing so requires investment or resources. Importantly, we have indicators for whether the household experienced a natural disaster, serious illness of a household member, death of a household member, falling agricultural prices, decrease in income, or loss of employment since the previous survey round. In addition to these shocks, we also have information about the severity of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that hit Nepal on April 25, 2015. We use geospatial data from the United States Geological Survey's (USGS) Earthquake Hazards Program to construct a measure of the earthquake intensity at the village development committee (VDC) level. Specifically, using Quantum Geographic Information System (QGIS), we use the Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) measure and take the average over the space of each VDC. MMI measures the effect of an earthquake on the Earth's surface. It is more meaningful than simple magnitude and distance-from-epicenter measures when assessing how intensely an area was affected by an earthquake because it is intended to represent actual experience (e.g., people awakening, movement of furniture, etc.) (Worden & Wald, 2016; USGS, 2019).
Outcomes by migrant status
Husband alone | 0.136 | 0.105 | 0.156 | 0.000*** |
[0.209] | [0.187] | [0.220] | ||
Husband and wife jointly | 0.338 | 0.304 | 0.361 | 0.000*** |
[0.313] | [0.313] | [0.310] | ||
Wife alone | 0.108 | 0.177 | 0.062 | 0.000*** |
[0.208] | [0.256] | [0.152] | ||
Annual income | 11.562 | 11.826 | 11.388 | 0.000*** |
[3.117] | [2.931] | [3.223] | ||
Savings deposited in past month | 4.425 | 4.699 | 4.244 | 0.000*** |
[3.056] | [3.036] | [3.055] | ||
Currently borrowing | 6.922 | 7.049 | 6.838 | 0.128 |
[5.886] | [5.855] | [5.906] | ||
Currently lent | 1.630 | 1.945 | 1.421 | 0.000*** |
[4.006] | [4.307] | [3.780] | ||
Temptation goods | 4.124 | 3.528 | 4.515 | 0.000*** |
[3.685] | [3.677] | [3.638] | ||
Health care | 5.971 | 5.765 | 6.107 | 0.000*** |
[3.404] | [3.428] | [3.381] | ||
Ceremonies or celebrations | 7.111 | 7.063 | 7.143 | 0.143 |
[2.298] | [2.357] | [2.259] | ||
Child education | 5.128 | 5.856 | 4.641 | 0.000*** |
[3.381] | [2.961] | [3.553] | ||
Child clothing | 5.184 | 5.860 | 4.730 | 0.000*** |
[2.985] | [2.518] | [3.181] | ||
Adult women clothing | 6.330 | 6.424 | 6.268 | 0.000*** |
[1.626] | [1.464] | [1.721] | ||
7,572 | 3,013 | 4,559 | 7,572 |
Our decision-making data are based on a survey question (posed to the wife) that asks who in the household makes the decision regarding a particular expenditure. We first create variables for each good that describe who makes the decision – the husband alone, wife alone, or husband and wife jointly. While the survey allowed for additional compositions of decision-making power between household members, we focus on cases where either the husband has sole control, the wife has sole control, or the husband and wife jointly make the decision. This implies that for a given category, the three indicators need not sum to one. Note that the compositions allowed changes between survey rounds, which required us to harmonize survey responses over time; see Section C2 of the Appendix for more details. See Section C1 of the Appendix for details about the items that compose each category, which changes slightly between survey rounds. When only one item makes up a category, the outcome variable is binary. It is missing only when the entire set of items in its category are missing, which happens when the respondent replies “I don’t know” or refuses to answer to the question. Moreover, when respondents answer “not applicable”, meaning no decision was made, we code all decision-making outcomes for that item as zero. Furthermore, we report summary statistics for each expenditure category broken down by migrant status in Section C1 of the Appendix in Table C1.
Across all households in our sample, 34% of expenditure decisions are made jointly, while men alone decide 14% and their wives alone decide 11%. But, averaging across households hides substantial heterogeneity by the husband's migrant status. Figure 1 reveals a striking pattern that illustrates the main narrative of our empirical results. Before husbands migrate, 27% of decisions are made jointly, while 18% are made by the husband alone and 11% are made by the wife alone.
Data are pooled 2014–2018 values. The figure depicts the mean fraction of all expenditure decisions (considered in this paper) that are made either by the individual or jointly as indicated; 95% confidence intervals are also displayed. See Section C1 of the Appendix for more details on how each expenditure category is constructed. “Future” indicates that the husband will migrate in the next period, “current” indicates migration in the current period, “past” indicates that the husband migrated in the previous period, and “never” indicates that the husband did not migrate during any of the survey rounds. These groups are mutually exclusive and, therefore, we omit the 102 observations that both migrated in the previous period and will migrate in the future period.
During migration spells, decision-making power shifts in favor of the wife as she becomes more than twice as likely as before to make sole decisions. Although she is unlikely to retain newly acquired sole decision-making power following her husband's return, a much higher share of subsequent decisions (47%) are made jointly. This anticipates our main finding: a husband's migration spell seems to increase his wife's involvement in household decision-making, which she partially retains upon his return. Moreover, these summary statistics highlight why decision-making is not simply mechanically related to migration status – clearly, husbands remain involved to some extent upon migrating.
Household finances undoubtedly play a role in a household's decision to migrate and also likely change as a result of migration, which explains why much of the existing literature on the welfare effects of migration has primarily focused on how remittances or incomes affect households. For example, Yang (2008) takes advantage of a unique natural experiment, using plausibly exogenous exchange rate fluctuations, to show that remittances lead to increased investment in the Philippines. Bryan et al. (2014) apply a randomized incentive to show increased food and nonfood expenditures among migrant households in Bangladesh. Gibson et al. (2017) use a difference-in-differences approach to demonstrate increased income, consumption, and savings among migrant households in Tonga. Yang (2011) and Adams (2011) provide thorough summaries of this literature.
Acknowledging this important income channel, we apply data on annual household income, savings deposited in the past month, amount borrowed currently, and amount lending currently (to capture informal lending). Throughout the analysis, any monetary values are in 2014 Nepali rupees (adjusted for inflation) and transformed using the inverse hyperbolic sine ( As is typical with financial data from developing countries, our data contain many zeros. For example, the number of zeros for our expenditures range from 5% to 43% depending on the expenditure type. Following Clemens and Tiongson (2017), we apply the inverse hyperbolic sine (or
Mirroring the construction of decision-making categories, we observe spending on six categories of goods: temptation goods (alcohol and tobacco), formal health care, ceremonies and celebrations, children's education, children's clothing, and adult women's clothing. As with the financial data, throughout the analysis, amounts are in 2014 Nepali rupees (adjusted for inflation) and transformed using the inverse hyperbolic sine ( For the final two rounds of the survey, male decision-makers (if present) were asked to answer the expenditure module in order to maximize data accuracy. As noted in Section 4, we check that this is not driving our results by running the main regressions with just the first two rounds of data.
The key empirical challenge for this analysis is that the decision to migrate is not randomly assigned. It therefore may be correlated with factors that also affect the outcomes, resulting in an issue of omitted variables. Moreover, many variables that factor into one's decision to migrate (such as earnings potential) are fundamentally unobserved. To overcome this challenge, similar to Antman (2015), we use household FE to compare changes in the outcomes
Our basic regression approach is presented in the equation below:
See Section 2 and Appendix (Section C) for how these variables are defined. See Section 2 and Appendix (Section C) for how these variables are defined.
The coefficient of interest in Eq. (1), β1, captures the average difference in household
The advantage of using household FE is that any time-invariant household-level characteristics will be held constant. For example, differences in underlying risk preferences or ability across households do not affect our estimates. In addition, we can control for any time-varying factors that might also be related to the migration decision and the outcome variables. One particularly important time-varying control variable is whether a household has past migration experience. Following Antman (2015), our second estimation includes
Our vector of time-varying controls,
For β1 to represent a causal effect, we must assume that changes in decision-making and expenditures would have looked similar in the absence of migration spells across all households, conditional on household FE, year FE, and observed time-varying characteristics of households. While this is arguably a weak assumption, one concern may be that households experience
As discussed before, the comparison group in Eqs. (1) and (2) includes both households for whom we do not observe migration over the observed time periods and those whose husbands do migrate at some point, albeit not during the present period. Even after controlling for past migration experience in Eq. (2), including nonmigrants as part of the comparison is not ideal – their lack of migration could indicate systematic differences from those whom have previously migrated (which we control for), or importantly –
Finally, if inherent ability or some other unobserved characteristic is causing certain households to
The estimation thus becomes
One concern with Eq. (3) is that the household-specific time trends pick up not only households’ pretrends in the outcomes but also the dynamic effects of migration should they exist. Using a past study on state-level changes in unilateral divorce laws, Wolfers (2006) shows that policy-level time trends can lead to misleading results, such as overestimating the effect of a policy or even estimating it in the wrong direction. One way to circumvent this issue is to estimate the effect relative only to pretrends. In our case, we cannot apply this solution because our “policy” (a migrant spell) happens for some households at the beginning of our data set, so we lack pretrends for part of our sample. Moreover, we see migrant spells end in our data, which makes it unclear whether or not to treat future periods as pretrend periods.
Our approach considers two broad categories of main outcomes: women's decision-making power in a household; and expenditures. Our hypothesis is that changes in women's decision-making power drive changes in expenditures. To examine this pathway, we need to rule out other mediating factors, particularly income. Income effects are a main reason for migration, so we expect to observe income effects associated with the migration of any family member. The main concern is that any changes in spending may merely reflect the fact that households earn more during migration spells, which has an income effect. Toward this aim, we again estimate Eqs. (1)–(3) using income and other financial outcomes, in order to test for the existence of other such financial factors that might be driving changes in expenditures.
To rule out these mediating factors, we exploit the migration of sons. The logic is that when sons migrate, we expect to observe a similar income effect but no related shift in decision-making power. To the extent that these households are similar to households that send husbands, this approach provides a useful test for whether observed differences in spending patterns are simply reflecting income effects. Implementing the approach is simple; we again estimate Eqs. (1)–(3), this time defining the There may be multiple sons who migrate or different sons who migrate over different time periods. We simply include a dummy variable for the situation that there is at least one son who is currently migrating in order to most closely mirror the main analysis and avoid making arbitrary specification decisions.
A unique contribution of this paper is to consider the persistence of effects after a husband returns from his migration outpost. To do this, we turn to a first-difference model, which allows us to decompose the
This first-difference approach differs from the earlier specification in a few ways. First, the dependent variable, Δ
Analogous to how β1 represents the within-household change A “within-household change” refers to the change within a household over time. This is the relevant interpretation due to the inclusion of household fixed effects. A positive
In this section, we report our results. To summarize, we show that when husbands migrate, their wives make more decisions and households spend their money differently. Observed changes in expenditures appear to be mediated by changes in decision-making. Upon a migrants’ return, decision-making power is more equitably shared.
Table 3 reports the results from regressing decision-making outcomes on the husband's changing migration status. Each cell reports the coefficient on a binary variable indicating that the husband is currently migrating (
Shifts in decision-making power as the husband's migrant status changes
Husband alone | −0.042*** (0.010) | −0.038*** (0.010) | −0.039*** (0.009) | −0.019 (0.016) |
Husband and wife jointly | −0.092*** (0.014) | −0.112*** (0.016) | −0.104*** (0.016) | −0.125*** (0.026) |
Wife alone | 0.101*** (0.011) | 0.107*** (0.013) | 0.110*** (0.014) | 0.108*** (0.019) |
7,569 | 7,569 | 3,010 | 3,010 | |
Husband alone | −0.065*** (0.014) | −0.064*** (0.016) | −0.067*** (0.016) | −0.065** (0.027) |
Husband and wife jointly | −0.037*** (0.009) | −0.052*** (0.011) | −0.044*** (0.012) | −0.055*** (0.018) |
Wife alone | 0.017*** (0.005) | 0.018*** (0.005) | 0.016*** (0.006) | 0.009 (0.011) |
7,524 | 7,524 | 2,993 | 2,993 | |
Husband alone | −0.038*** (0.013) | −0.035** (0.014) | −0.031** (0.013) | −0.005 (0.022) |
Husband and wife jointly | −0.131*** (0.018) | −0.161*** (0.020) | −0.147*** (0.022) | −0.161*** (0.040) |
Wife alone | 0.140*** (0.017) | 0.160*** (0.020) | 0.155*** (0.022) | 0.154*** (0.031) |
7,564 | 7,564 | 3,009 | 3,009 | |
Husband alone | −0.037*** (0.012) | −0.031** (0.012) | −0.030** (0.012) | −0 (0.023) |
Husband and wife jointly | −0.104*** (0.019) | −0.126*** (0.021) | −0.114*** (0.022) | −0.130*** (0.037) |
Wife alone | 0.119*** (0.014) | 0.127*** (0.017) | 0.127*** (0.018) | 0.118*** (0.028) |
7,537 | 7,537 | 2,999 | 2,999 | |
Husband alone | −0.043*** (0.016) | −0.036** (0.015) | −0.038*** (0.015) | −0.016 (0.024) |
Husband and wife jointly | −0.091*** (0.023) | −0.099*** (0.024) | −0.108*** (0.027) | −0.137*** (0.045) |
Wife alone | 0.135*** (0.018) | 0.139*** (0.022) | 0.153*** (0.023) | 0.147*** (0.031) |
7,415 | 7,415 | 2,978 | 2,978 | |
Husband alone | −0.043*** (0.014) | −0.038*** (0.014) | −0.037*** (0.014) | −0.013 (0.023) |
Husband and wife jointly | −0.106*** (0.023) | −0.114*** (0.026) | −0.127*** (0.027) | −0.181*** (0.041) |
Wife alone | 0.153*** (0.018) | 0.159*** (0.023) | 0.172*** (0.023) | 0.171*** (0.033) |
7,469 | 7,469 | 2,995 | 2,995 | |
Husband alone | −0.034** (0.014) | −0.023 (0.015) | −0.031** (0.015) | −0.002 (0.025) |
Husband and wife jointly | −0.147*** (0.023) | −0.177*** (0.025) | −0.164*** (0.026) | −0.202*** (0.049) |
Wife alone | 0.150*** (0.018) | 0.167*** (0.022) | 0.167*** (0.023) | 0.167*** (0.040) |
7,553 | 7,553 | 3,008 | 3,008 | |
Household and year FE | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Controls | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Limited sample | No | No | Yes | Yes |
HH-specific time trends | No | No | No | Yes |
FE, fixed effects; HH, household; VDC, Village Development Committees.
Panel A shows a striking shift in decision-making power from the husband to his wife while he is migrating. During migration spells, the husband relinquishes at least some control over 13% of all decisions (of which 4% were otherwise made alone and 9% were otherwise made jointly). The wife subsequently gains sole decision-making power over 10% of decisions. Recall that decision-making power classifications are mutually exclusive but not exhaustive: respondents could report deciding with someone other than the male head of the household. We omit these outcomes in order to focus on outcomes we believe will change The increase in women's sole control over temptation goods decisions loses significance when including time trends, but this could be in part because the estimates are more noisy.
Decision-making power is not only an important indicator of gender equality; who makes decisions may also affect the decisions that households make. In Table 4, we report how the household changes expenditures during the husband's migration spell. To do this, we again estimate Eq. (1), this time using the expenditure variables described in Section 2.4, transformed using the inverse hyperbolic sine (
Shifts in expenditures (
Temptation goods | −1.053*** (0.168) | −1.204*** (0.178) | −1.184*** (0.176) | −1.196*** (0.308) |
7,417 | 7,417 | 2,940 | 2,940 | |
Health care | −0.009 (0.142) | −0.035 (0.166) | −0.031 (0.173) | 0.257 (0.301) |
7,145 | 7,145 | 2,850 | 2,850 | |
Ceremonies or celebrations | 0.044 (0.105) | 0.014 (0.100) | 0.067 (0.109) | −0.196 (0.237) |
7,407 | 7,407 | 2,948 | 2,948 | |
Child education | 0.170* (0.101) | 0.272*** (0.104) | 0.181* (0.108) | −0.190 (0.178) |
7,339 | 7,339 | 2,954 | 2,954 | |
Child clothing | 0.385*** (0.096) | 0.442*** (0.104) | 0.437*** (0.109) | 0.176 (0.167) |
7,349 | 7,349 | 2,965 | 2,965 | |
Adult women clothing | −0.071 (0.063) | −0.057 (0.064) | −0.029 (0.065) | 0.016 (0.124) |
7,548 | 7,548 | 3,005 | 3,005 | |
Household and year FE | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Controls | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Limited sample | No | No | Yes | Yes |
HH-specific time trends | No | No | No | Yes |
FE, fixed effects; HH, household; VDC, Village Development Committees.
When a husband migrates, households reduce expenditures on temptation goods (alcohol and tobacco products) and increase their spending on children's education and clothing by (at least) 17% and 39%, respectively. The results are robust with and without control variables and remain robust when we limit the sample to migrants at any point in time. However, the statistically significant increases children's education and clothing spending are not robust to the inclusion of household-specific time trends. As discussed in Section 3, it is not clear how to interpret such a finding. On the one hand, this could indicate that households with systematically different trends in spending on children select into husband migration. On the other hand, migration spells may lead households to Labor market frictions likely prevent perfect sorting across space (especially in a setting like Nepal); therefore, we fully expect to observe at least
The observed changes in the spending on temptation goods and children's clothing are robust to the sensitivity analyses presented in Section D of the Appendix. Section D of the Appendix analyzes the sensitivity of these results to the
We have shown that when a husband migrates, his wife makes more decisions and the household shifts spending from temptation goods to children's clothing. These changes in spending are a composite of changes in decision-making and anything else that might change as a result of husbands’ migration spells. To argue that the changes in expenditures are
Having shown that an income effect could be at work, we turn to the migration of
One challenge with interpreting these results is that households in which the husband migrates might be systematically different from households in which the son (or sons) migrates. To get a better sense of how comparable these households might be, Table B4 summarizes the characteristics of households with husband migrants and son migrants separately. Table B4 shows that the parents (wives and husbands) of son migrants are older, less educated, and less likely to be literate than the spouses of husband migrants. This is not surprising since they (biologically) must be an older generation, and older generations tend to be less educated. As long as these things are time invariant, the household FE model will control for them. The composition of the household also changes across time and looks different in “migrant son” households compared to “migrant husband” households. For example, when a son is old enough to migrate, it is also more likely that a daughter-in-law resides with the household (presumably the son's wife) and less likely that a mother-in-law or father-in-law is present. We now include these characteristics in our control vector for all specifications.
What does matter is (1) whether the systematic differences are unobserved and varying at the household year level and (2) whether these differences would cause income effects to be characteristically different. Table B4 thus shows that migrant son households are systematically more likely to have experienced natural disasters, falling agricultural prices, or a decrease in income. This could mean, for instance, that migrant-son households are migrating for different reasons (i.e., economic hardship) than migrant-husband households. This only matters if this difference indicates that migrant-son households will not experience an income effect in the same way that migrant-husband households would. Fortunately, we can control directly for shocks and other time-varying factors (such as household composition), and our empirical strategy accounts for many of the systematic differences between migrant-husband and migrant-son households. Nevertheless, we interpret these results with caution, given the potential systematic differences between households compared in this analysis and the main analysis. These results provide suggestive evidence that women gain autonomy over decisions when their husbands migrate, and this autonomy is what drives increased spending on children and less on tobacco and alcohol.
In a final empirical contribution, we explore whether the changes in spending habits and decision-making persist after husbands return. Figure 2 reports the coefficients α1 and α2 from estimating Eq. (4) for decision-making aggregated across all categories. Table F1 (Section F of the Appendix) reports the same results and also the results disaggregated by expenditure type in table format.
Coefficient plots of α2 (left panel) and α1 (right panel) from Eq. (4) are depicted (see Table F1 for coefficients listed in a table); 95% confidence intervals displayed, with robust standard errors clustered on VDC. The different colors/shapes each indicate a separate regression. Blue dots are from regressing husband's decision-making power on Eq. (4) and therefore represent changes in the fraction of decisions over which the husband has the only say. Hollow circles represent the change in the fraction of decisions made jointly. Hollow triangles represent the change in the wife's sole decision-making power.
We find that when a husband leaves, the growth in decisions made by the wife alone is 9 percentage points differentially higher (or more positive) compared to changes over time periods when the husband's migration status does not change. At the same time, overall involvement (joint or alone) by the husband grows differentially An alternative specification where we include an indicator variable for whether the husband had gone away or was at home in both
Even if women ultimately gain shared decision-making power after a husband returns, it may not ultimately affect the decisions the household makes. This could happen if, for instance, husbands have disproportionately more bargaining power and therefore household decisions are still more likely to reflect their preferences. Table 5 reports the results from the regression in Eq. (4) with changes in expenditures as the dependent variable. Each row represents a different regression with a different dependent variable.
Dynamic shifts in expenditures: first-difference approach (
Δ Temptation goods | 1.084*** (0.361) | −0.952** (0.386) | 0.819 | 3,491 |
Δ Health care | 0.328 (0.369) | 0.672** (0.329) | 0.467 | 3,368 |
Δ Ceremonies or celebrations | −0.403 (0.286) | −0.909*** (0.299) | 0.163 | 3,473 |
Δ Child education | −0.310 (0.236) | −0.450* (0.258) | 0.615 | 3,389 |
Δ Child clothing | −0.107 (0.213) | −0.119 (0.243) | 0.955 | 3,407 |
Δ Adult women clothing | −0.027 (0.153) | −0.120 (0.165) | 0.693 | 3,563 |
Among the categories for which we observed a change in the main result – temptation goods, children's education, and children's clothing – there are no asymmetric changes. In fact, spending on temptation goods appears to rebound by almost the exact same amount. This underscores that even if migration may change who participates in decision-making, the relative bargaining position of the decision-makers may play a large role in what decisions are made. Nevertheless, any lasting changes in decision-making power are an important first step toward more-equitable decision-making. For children's education, evidence from the fixed effects estimate (presented in Table 4) showed that households spend more on children's education during a husband's migration spell. Table 5 now suggests a reduction in the
We have shown that when husbands migrate, decision-making power tends to shift toward the wife, and there is suggestive evidence that she retains some decision-making power after he returns. A natural next question is: what is driving this pattern?
When a household member migrates for work, the composition of the resident household members also changes, which could affect the household economic decision-making power through several channels. First, shifting control over household decisions to his wife could be purely practical, as the migrant is less able to manage the household from a distance. Second, a husband's migration could increase his wife's bargaining power: migration affects labor allocation not only by the migrant, but also by those at home (Abdulloev et al., 2014; Lokshin and Glinskaya, 2009), thus affecting each individual's relative contribution to household income.
In addition, geographic separation could introduce asymmetric information about household decisions, therefore allowing the wife to make
If husbands and wives have heterogeneous preferences, any of these three channels would ultimately lead to different household decisions. We are unable to distinguish between these three channels in order to identify what exactly drives contemporaneous changes in decision-making. However, none of these explanations on their own are likely to explain the possibility of persistence over time. One potential explanation consistent with persistent effects is that the male migrant is “bringing home” norms and customs from their destinations. This seems unlikely since Nepali migrants mostly migrate to the Middle East, Far East, or to other cities within Nepal. These destinations are not known for their liberal gender norms, and if anything, we might expect this mechanism to result in fewer decisions being made by women upon the migrant's return.
In order to explain persistence, we suggest that a different mechanism must be at work: habit formation. According to Wood and Neal (2007), “Habits are learned dispositions to repeat past responses. They are triggered by features of the context that have covaried frequently with past performance, including performance locations, preceding actions in a sequence, and particular people.” In economics, the original model of habit formation by Becker and Murphy (1998) assumes that past consumption affects current utility (what Becker and Murphy describe as “rational addiction”). This assumption describes the inherent “stickiness” of habits. Once formed, habits are difficult to override.
Current habits may be triggered to form (or dissolve) when some sort of shock causes individuals to reevaluate their behavioral choices (Verplanken et al., 2008; Wood and Neal, 2009). For example, a move to a new city (Verplanken et al., 2008) or transferring to a new university (Wood et al., 2005) provides a sufficiently different context that encourages individuals to form new habits. Likewise, the migration of a prominent household decision-maker represents a similarly discontinuous change in context that disrupts the household's usual decision-making process.
Of course, new habits are not guaranteed to stick. When a male migrant returns, what is stopping the household from resorting to their previous decision-making habits? Becker and Murphy's original habit-formation model offers an explanation: current preferences evolve over time through a process of “learning by doing.” The original “learning by doing” economics model, which builds on an even longer literature from education and psychology, is often attributed to Arrow (1962).
This learning process takes time. Therefore, we expect the habit to form more strongly in households with longer migration spells. We can test for this by estimating Eqs. (1)–(3) again, this time including an interaction for the situation that the trip was declared to last for >6 months. Table 6 reports the results of this approach using decisions aggregated across all categories as the outcome. These data come from the same survey question used to identify migrants, which asks about resident status. Enumerators were asked to specify whether the residency (if not at home) was greater than or less than 6 months. We cannot rule out the possibility that enumerators answered based on
Heterogeneity by trip length: change in decision-making (all categories)
Migrant | 0.00525 (0.0145) | 0.00860 (0.0152) | 0.00735 (0.0148) | 0.0209 (0.0257) |
Migrant × ≥ 6 months | −0.0619*** (0.0144) | −0.0616*** (0.0152) | −0.0600*** (0.0152) | −0.0541** (0.0224) |
7,569 | 7,569 | 3,010 | 3,010 | |
Migrant | −0.0784*** (0.0212) | −0.0975*** (0.0232) | −0.0905*** (0.0242) | −0.105*** (0.0356) |
Migrant × ≥ 6 months | −0.0180 (0.0231) | −0.0184 (0.0224) | −0.0176 (0.0225) | −0.0274 (0.0362) |
7,569 | 7,569 | 3,010 | 3,010 | |
Migrant | 0.0645*** (0.0178) | 0.0700*** (0.0194) | 0.0738*** (0.0210) | 0.0631* (0.0322) |
Migrant × ≥ 6 months | 0.0478** (0.0221) | 0.0485** (0.0224) | 0.0467** (0.0224) | 0.0606* (0.0330) |
7,569 | 7,569 | 3,010 | 3,010 | |
Household FE | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Controls | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Limited sample | No | No | Yes | Yes |
HH-specific time trends | No | No | No | Yes |
HH, household; VDC, Village Development Committees.
During a husband's migration spell, his wife may exert more control over household resources and therefore change how the household spends income. Given the prevalence of seasonal migration in developing countries, even these temporary changes could have consequences for economic development. The extent to which these changes persist after migration spells will magnify these consequences.
Using a panel data of rural Nepali households, we present evidence that a husband's migration leads to contemporaneous shifts in intrahousehold decision-making: a husband's absence increases the expenditure decisions over which the wife has full control by 10 percentage points. These households also shift away from expenditures on alcohol and tobacco in favor of children's education and clothing. We exploit the migration of sons – which increases household income but does not change decision-making – to show that this does not seem to be driven by an income effect.
To address the challenge of self-selection into migration and omitted variables that could threaten our interpretation of these findings, we rely on household FE, conditioning on eventual selection into migration, and including household-specific time trends. These approaches address the concern that time-invariant and time-variant unobservables among households, such as household risk aversion or differential income trajectories across households, drive our results. Our results provide a narrative largely consistent across these empirical strategies. We argue that this approach, in addition with the narrative that the results form as a whole, provides a compelling case for our interpretation.
One remaining challenge relates to the location of the consumer of the good. For each kind of expenditure, we do not directly observe the consumer. One might hypothesize that temptation goods are consumed more often by men than women. If this is the case, then when men migrate, expenditures on temptation goods will decline simply because the consumer is no longer present. This presents a challenge to the interpretation of our main results. Disentangling this channel presents an important area of future research. However, we believe that our results tell another story. First, shifts in decision-making power are strongest for temptation goods, but there is evidence for changes in other categories as well. These other categories include expenditures that are definitely not consumed by the male migrant (children's education and clothing; and adult women clothing). Our analysis of persistence is also relevant; women retain some decision-making power when male migrants return, which seems to reflect changes in decision-making that go beyond the absence of the primary consumer. This is true even in the temptation goods category.
One important contribution of our paper is to show that the economic decisions are more likely to be made jointly even after a male migrant returns. This could be driven by either the importation of norms from abroad or a habit-formation model. We find that migration spells that last longer have larger changes in decision-making, which we argue is relatively more consistent with a habit-formation model. This suggests that even temporary migration spells may help achieve gender equality in economic decision-making, with downstream effects on how households spend their income. When women play a role in decisions, they are more likely to invest in the next generation, increasing the likelihood that a pernicious cycle of intergenerational poverty can be broken.
The evidence presented in this paper suggests that a new habit of more-equitable household decision-making can be formed over a period of temporary migration. If the new habit “sticks” and women continue to take part in economic decisions, then it seems plausible that temporary male migration could provide a mechanism for lasting cultural change. Our analysis can only speak to short-term effects, but the results are promising. Women's labor force participation in Nepal, a key indicator of gender equality, offers suggestive evidence supporting this narrative. When compared to its South Asian neighbors, Nepali female labor force participation rate (LFPR) stands out: while nearly 80% of women participate in the labor force in Nepal, only 26% do in India. Afghanistan has the next highest rate of female LFPR at 44%. Estimates are from the most recent year for which data are available for Nepal, i.e., 2010.