SIEPR’s Alessandra Voena and her co-authors find a rift between what people believe and what they think others believe about certain policies meant to empower women.
Younger Americans, especially, have found their own use for prenuptial agreements: protecting their spouses from the worst impulses of the American debt-collection system.
Husbands and wives sometimes do not agree. In a post about a year ago, I talked about how this disagreement seemed to be associated with welfare outcomes for women, boys and girls. An intriguing new paper by Nava Ashraf, Erica Field, Alessandra Voena and Roberta Ziparo argues that asymmetric information may be exacerbating this disagreement and shows how providing information can help couples get to a better place…and reduce fertility.
The setting is Lusaka, Zambia. National fertility rates are on the high side, with 5.3 children per woman aged 15-49. In this context, as in many others, men would prefer, on average, to have more children than women (in Ashraf and co’s sample, men would like 4.43, women 4.19). Maternal mortality is high: 1 in 59 Zambian women die giving birth. And men are less aware of the factors that contribute to maternal mortality than women. For example, 84.6 percent of women identify advanced maternal age as a risk factor, but only 74.3 percent of men do.