Natalia Rigol Publications

Poor entrepreneurs must frequently choose between business investment and children's education. To examine this trade-off, we exploit experimental variation in short-run microenterprise growth among a sample of Indian households and track schooling and business out-comes over eleven years. Treated households, who experience higher initial microenterprise growth, are on average one-third more likely to send children to college. However, educational investment and schooling gains are concentrated among literate-parent households, whose enterprises eventually stagnate. In contrast, illiterate-parent households experience long-run business gains but declines in children's education. Our findings suggest that microenterprise growth has the potential to reduce relative intergenerational educational mobility.

Can increasing control over earnings incentivize a woman to work, and thereby influence norms around gender roles? We randomly varied whether rural Indian women received bank accounts, training in account use, and direct deposit of public sector wages into their own (versus husbands') accounts. Relative to the accounts only group, women who also received direct deposit and training worked more in public and private sector jobs. The private sector result suggests gender norms initially constrained female employment. Three years later, direct deposit and training broadly liberalized women's own work-related norms, and shifted perceptions of community norms.

Can greater control over earned income incentivize women to work and influence gender norms? In collaboration with Indian government partners, we provided rural women with individual bank accounts and randomly varied whether their wages from a public workfare program were directly deposited into these accounts or into the male household head’s account (the status quo). Women in a random subset of villages were also trained on account use. In the short run, relative to women just offered bank accounts, those who also received direct deposit and training increased their labor supply in the public and private sectors. In the long run, gender norms liberalized: women who received direct deposit and training became more accepting of female work, and their husbands perceived fewer social costs to having a wife who works. These effects were concentrated in households with otherwise lower levels of, and stronger norms against, female work. Women in these households also worked more in the long run and became more empowered. These patterns are consistent with models of household decisionmaking in which increases in bargaining power from greater control over income interact with, and influence, gender norms.