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Inefficient Decision Making and Female Bargaining Power

Project description

Improving women’s decision-making power in families

Families make choices and reach decisions that guide behaviours. Ideally, this process of family decision-making is characterised by cooperation, commitment and efficiency. But this is not always the case. The EU-funded FEMPOWER project will improve our understanding of household decision-making, which is crucial to ensuring policy design that reduces the likelihood of harmful consequences for women. Specifically, it will develop frameworks for estimating models of decision-making that can capture inefficient behaviour in three circumstances: domestic violence, divorce and generally inefficient households. It will draw on empirical facts about behaviour in these contexts. To do so, it will harness new large-scale data sources and develop empirical tools to review how family decision-making works.

Objective

Dominant economic models of household decision-making assume a utopian scenario characterised by cooperation, commitment, and efficiency. While elegant and tractable, a range of common family behaviours fall outside the scope of these frameworks limiting our understanding of households as economic units and their role in helping individuals insure against shocks. Furthermore, the policy prescriptions implied by the standard models can result in harmful unintended consequences if implemented in contexts where non-cooperative decision-making prevails (Erten and Keskin, 2018; Bobonis et al, 2013).

FEMPOWER will make both methodological and substantive contributions to the economic literature on female bargaining power by harnessing novel sources of administrative and survey data and by building on my expertise in developing innovative ways of modelling family decision making. FEMPOWER will develop frameworks for estimating models of decision-making that can capture potentially inefficient behaviour in three different Work Packages: (1) Violence & Household Decision-Making; (2) Decision-Making at Divorce; (3) A General Model of Inefficient Households. Each work package will be structured around three complementary activities:
1. Developing high quality empirical facts about behaviour in these contexts using novel administrative data sources;
2. Deriving the conditions under which new, innovative economic theories of behaviour can be tested and estimated;
3. Estimating the key economic parameters of interest to assess the positive and normative impact of policy proposals.
To enable me to exploit existing data sets and identifying variation that are particularly well suited to answering the research questions posed, each Work Package draws on data from a different OECD country: Finland (Work Package I), UK (Work Package II), and Sweden (Work Package III).

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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ERC-STG - Starting Grant

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2020-STG

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Host institution

THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 470 375,00
Address
WELLINGTON SQUARE UNIVERSITY OFFICES
OX1 2JD Oxford
United Kingdom

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Region
South East (England) Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Oxfordshire
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 470 375,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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