The work in UNEQUALWITHIN is centered around three main components: (i) the development of novel measurement tools and survey instruments, (ii) the collection of data in a randomized controlled trial and a lab-in-the-field experiment, and (iii) a global study on establishing facts about local and global inequalities.
Several strands of progress have been achieved before the project was terminated. One notable example is the development of new measurements for intra-household decision making and parental resource allocation preferences. This has culminated in a publication in a high-ranking international journal Econometrica, titled “Economics and Measurement: New Measures to Model Decision Making” (Almås, Attanasio and Jervis, 2024), which draws on and discusses work from UNEQUALWITHIN.
Furthermore, the project has developed new measurement tools as the basis for the data collection that will ultimately inform the formulation of an integrated framework to improve the understanding of the mechanisms behind intra-household consumption inequalities and child development. A number of data collection efforts were successfully finalized during the project period; however, the lab-in-the-field experiment in India and the global study remains unimplemented at the time of project completion. First, the project team has contributed to an RCT that implements two interventions to improve early child development outcomes but may also have effects on intra-household inequalities with respect to parental preferences for resource allocation and decision-making: (i) a regular cash transfers, and (ii) a parenting program. The successful implementation of the RCT baseline and midline data collection with more than 3,000 households is another achievement of the project. Secondly, the project team has conceptualized, prepared, and implemented a lab-in-the-field experiment in Tanzania with the related RCT sample, in which the survey instruments were validated for the Tanzanian context. For the lab-in-the-field experiment in Tanzania, participants were randomized to answering the task hypotactically or incentivized. The task consisted of three stages which mean the participants first allocated a budget among themselves, their partner, and the target child, then divided each allocation into spending categories, and those who were incentivized could make immediate purchases from a pop-up shop. The incentivized and hypothetical conditions produced statistically indistinguishable allocations, providing support for the use of cost-effective hypothetical elicitation in future large-scale surveys. Design features where also documented which helped safeguard internal validity, such as recording any reallocations at the shop and conducting follow-up calls to detect resale or crowding-out effects. The lab-in-the-field experiment in Tanzania is a stepping stone towards testing these measures also in other contexts and ultimately developing new research tools that can significantly advance the research discipline beyond the state of the art. Congruently, the interplay of RCT, lab experiment allows us to study behavioral preferences not in the isolation of the laboratory environment but in front of a backdrop of rich contextual data. This marks the first step towards an integrated and universal framework.
