Natalia Cantet es Profesora Asistente del Departamento de Economía de la Universidad EAFIT. Tiene un PhD en Economía por University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign y es Magíster en Economía por la UNLP y Licenciada en Economía por la UTDT. Sus investigaciones se centran en temas de desarrollo económico, economía de la salud, economía de la educación, econometría aplicada y microeconomía. Sus trabajos han sido publicados en revistas académicas como Studies in Family Planning.

Abstract: Freedom of choice is a fundamental aspect of individuals’ social, economic, and political lives, and it is considered the ultimate goal of development. However, one paradoxical aspect is that men are the primary decision-makers in many cultures at the household and community levels. We use a two-stage field experiment to examine whether men’s and women’s underlying motivations to exert agency differ. In the first stage, participants make a donation decision on an individual and a joint endowment. In the second stage, and without previous announcements, participants can delegate the decision to either a random device, their spouses, or a stranger. This stage allows us to identify whether men and women value agency equally. Similar to Neri and Rommeswinkel (2017), the treatment conditions vary the control individuals exert on others’ payoff to disentangle the role of preferences for independence, power, or self-reliance as mechanisms explaining agency. We find gender differences regarding the preferences to keep the decision rights. Our findings imply that men strongly prefer freedom, while similar behaviour is not found in women paired with their spouses.

Autores: Natalia Cantet (Universidad EAFIT), Marcela Ibañez (Universität Göttingen), Tatiana Orozco-Garcia (Universität Göttingen) & Gerhard Riener (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Dusseldorf)

Organizan: Departamento de Economía, Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Revista Económica

Contacto: iie@econo.unlp.edu.ar