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on Gender |
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Issue of 2022‒03‒14
two papers chosen by Jan Sauermann Institutet för Arbetsmarknads- och Utbildningspolitisk Utvärdering |
| By: | Zhang, Wei; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela; Valappanandi, Sanoop; Balakrishna, Raksha; Reddy, Hemalatha; Janssen, Marco A.; Thomas, Liya; Priyadarshini, Pratiti; Kandikuppa, Sandeep; Chaturvedi, Rahul; Ghate, Rucha |
| Abstract: | This paper presents results from a framed field experiment in which participants make decisions about extraction of a common-pool resource, a community forest. The experiment was designed and piloted as both a research activity and an experiential learning intervention during 2017-2018 with 120 groups of resource users (split by gender) from 60 habitations in two Indian states, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan. We examine whether local beliefs and norms about community forest, gender of participants, within-experiment treatments (non-communication, communication, and optional election of institutional arrangements (rules)) and remuneration methods affect harvest behaviour and groups’ tendency to cooperate. Furthermore, we explore whether the experiment and subsequent community debriefing had learning effects. Results reveal a “weak†Nash Equilibrium in which participants harvested substantially less than the Nash prediction even in the absence of communication, a phenomenon stronger for male than female participants in both states. For male groups in both states, both communication and optional rule election are associated with lower group harvest per round, as compared to the reference non-communication game. For female groups in both states, however, communication itself did not significantly slow down resource depletion; but the introduction of optional rule election did reduce harvest amounts. For both men and women in Andhra Pradesh and men in Rajasthan, incentivized payments to individual participants significantly lowered group harvest, relative to community flat payment, suggesting a possible “crowding-in†effect on pro-social norms. Despite the generally positive memory of the activity, reported actual changes are limited. This may be due to the lack of follow-up with the communities between the experiment and the revisit. The fact that many of the communities already have a good understanding of the importance of the relationships between (not) cutting trees and the ecosystem services from forests, with rules and strong internal norms against cutting that go beyond the felling of trees in the game, may have also meant that the game did not have as much to add. Findings have methodological and practical implications for designing behavioral intervention programs to improve common-pool resource governance. |
| Keywords: | INDIA; SOUTH ASIA; ASIA; gender; extraction; community forestry; collective ownership; field experimentation; forests; game; experiential learning; payment methods; common-pool resource; framed field experiments; |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:2091&r= |
| By: | Natalie Nitsche (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Ansgar Hudde |
| Abstract: | The Covid-19-pandemic-related closure of schools has affected the majority of the world’s students and remains a contentious issue. Using data from the UNESCO school database, the ISSP 2012, and country-level panel regressions, we leverage simultaneous school closures during the first wave of Covid-19 lockdowns to estimate the effect of gender ideology on school reopening schedules. We show that societal gender ideology has likely influenced school reopening policies: i.e., that societies with more supportive attitudes toward maternal employment reopened schools significantly sooner, and at higher intensities, than societies with less supportive attitudes toward maternal employment, relative to other reopening measures, and net of infection rates. Our findings suggest a causal effect of gender ideological beliefs regarding pandemic-related school closure policies. We test and exclude a variety of potential confounders, such as a country’s maternal employment rate, GDP, social spending, and cultural values toward children. We argue that school closures may be perceived as less problematic in countries where more people support the ideal of a stay-at-home mother. Gender attitudes may thus represent a set of ideas that affect policy-makers’ decision-making via gender ideology normative framing or a potential gender ideology bias. However, the specific underlying mechanisms through which the gender ideology effect operates at the policy-maker level remain untested in our study, and should be investigated by future research. |
| JEL: | J1 Z0 |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2022-008&r= |