Gendered Spheres of Learning and Household Decision-Making over Fertility

This paper investigates whether information asymmetries within households about maternal health risk can explain persistent spousal disagreement over fertility in a high-fertility, high-maternal-mortality setting. The authors develop a theoretical model and conduct a randomized field experiment among approximately 500 couples in peri-urban Lusaka, Zambia, where the lifetime risk of maternal death is 1 in 59 women and the maternal mortality ratio is 398 deaths per 100,000 live births.

The central mechanism is a communication barrier that arises from conflicting fertility preferences between spouses. When husbands have higher desired fertility than wives (4.43 vs. 4.19 children on average in the study sample), wives who are better informed about maternal health risk lack the incentive to credibly transmit that information to their husbands. Strategic communication concerns — not a generically lower propensity of men to learn from women — drive this asymmetry. The model predicts a pooling equilibrium in which no informative communication flows from wives to husbands when preference divergence is sufficiently large.

Traditional Institutions in Modern Times: Dowries as Pensions When Sons Migrate

This paper asks whether dowry — a transfer from the bride’s family to the groom’s household upon marriage, prevalent throughout India — enables male migration by providing liquidity that compensates parents for the old-age support they would otherwise lose when sons leave the village. The core friction is that in patrilocal societies, sons traditionally co-reside with parents and share income in old age; migration disrupts this arrangement and introduces income-sharing frictions (limited commitment, information asymmetries, remittance costs). Dowry attenuates this friction by providing a liquid pool of resources at the time of marriage that the son can transfer to parents, lowering the net return to migration needed for a household to find migration optimal.

Alessandra Voena | Macro Paper Warehouse

Gendered Spheres of Learning and Household Decision-Making over Fertility

Traditional Institutions in Modern Times: Dowries as Pensions When Sons Migrate