Research

Job Market Paper:

“Household Decision-making and Women´s Labor Market Participation in a Developing Economy.” (with Radchenko, N.). Download

• Abstract

  “This paper investigates how household decision-making patterns influence female labor force participation in a developing economy. It also examines the role of social norms in this relationship, providing a conceptual framework that outlines the trade-off between the household’s economic surplus and the non-monetary cost of the wife working. This framework enables us to differentiate between household patterns in women’s employment, from the male breadwinner/female homemaker model to one defined by female agency. Using household reports on decision-making involvement from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS), we empirically test the model by examining the impact of household decision-making patterns on a woman’s participation in the labor market and her actual labor market outcomes. The findings support the conservative patriarchal model of household behavior, revealing the prevalence of the husband’s disutility from his wife’s work over her own preferences. Moreover, results suggest that the non-monetary cost of her employment plays a more signicant role than the income effect in shaping these outcomes. The results also highlight the persistence of social norms surrounding Indonesian women’s labor supply, both over time and across cohorts. Additionally, the study underscores the importance of nuanced measures of decision-making power by considering both spouses’ responses: spousal discrepancies in responses are not random and imply different evaluation scales with women tending to overestimate their degree of involvement. This contrasts with the standard literature, which frequently relies solely on the wife’s perspective.”

Working Papers:

“Bargaining Power Index: a Distributional Approach.” (with Radchenko, N.), Working Paper.

• Abstract

  “Measuring intra-household bargaining power is central to understanding economic decision-making and welfare outcomes. Existing indices often aggregate survey responses on decision-making in areas such as expenditures, time use, and women’s labor market participation into simple composite measures that overlook variation in response patterns and information from both spouses. This paper proposes a distribution-based approach that captures the full informational content of reported decisions, inspired by entropy-based logic. By incorporating responses from both household members and using the full range of each decision question, the method identifies patterns that signal stronger or weaker individual agency relative to prevailing social norms. Beyond outlining the conceptual foundations, the paper demonstrates how this index can improve the empirical measurement of bargaining power in applied economic analysis. Using household survey data, quantile regression estimates show that the new measure reflects known determinants of household bargaining and more reliably captures distributional shifts than existing benchmarks. This approach enhances the precision and interpretability of models linking household behavior to labor supply, consumption, and welfare outcomes offering a flexible framework for applied research and policy evaluation.”

• “Multigenerational Household Dynamics: Intrahousehold Bargaining and Women’s Labor Outcomes.”, Work in progress.

Other Publication:

• “From Legislation to Implementation: Building a New Industrial Policy in the United States.” (with Artecona, R., & Velloso, H. 2023). - Link