Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/191924 
Year of Publication: 
2018
Citation: 
[Editor:] Anderson, Siwan [Editor:] Beaman, Lori [Editor:] Platteau, Jean-Philippe [Title:] Towards Gender Equity in Development [ISBN:] 978-0-19-882959-1 [Series:] UNU-WIDER Studies in Development Economics [Publisher:] Oxford University Press [Place:] Oxford [Year:] 2018 [Pages:] 217-236
Publisher: 
Oxford University Press, Oxford
Abstract: 
A substantial amount of development programming assumes that women have preferences or aptitudes that are more conducive to economic development. For example, conditional cash transfer programmes commonly deliver funding to female household heads, and many microcredit schemes focus on women’s savings groups. This chapter examines a public goods game in northern Liberia. Women contributed substantially more to a small-scale development project when playing with other women than in mixed-gender groups, where they contributed at about the same levels as men. We try to explain this composition effect using a structural model, survey responses, and a second manipulation. Results suggest women in the all-women group put more weight on co-operation regardless of the value of the public good, the fear of discovery, or the desire to match others’ behaviour. We conjecture that players have stronger motivation to signal public-spiritedness when primed to consider themselves representatives of the women of the community.
Subjects: 
economic development
microcredit schemes
women’s savings groups
public goods
gender
Liberia
JEL: 
H41
J16
D7
C11
C93
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-sa Logo
Document Type: 
Book Part
Document Version: 
Published Version

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