This paper estimates the hidden cost of informal redistribution in urban Senegal. It is based on a lab-in-the-field experiment combined with a small-scale randomized controlled trial. We show that two-thirds of the experiment participants are ready to forgo up to 14% of their lab gains to keep them private. When they are given the opportunity to hide, they decrease by 27% the share of gains they transfer to kin and increase health and personal expenses. This is the first paper to identify the individual cost of informal redistribution and to relate it to real-life resource-allocation decisions in a controlled setting.
Divorce is frequent and widowhood is a common predicament for women in Africa, due in particular to the fact that women marry older men. Remarriage appears to take place relatively rapidly: the median duration between widowhood and remarriage among those who remarry is one year. For those who are divorced it is two years. A key question is how such discontinuous marital trajectories affect women’s well-being. Women’s marital trajectories in Senegal are described and correlated with measures of voice, resource constraints, and consumption welfare. Considerable selection into divorce and widowhood as well as subsequent remarriage is documented. Poorer women are more vulnerable to both dissolutions and remarriage and hence bear more of the costs while being nevertheless afforded a safety net in the form of a male protector. Marital breakdowns and their aftermaths are far from neutral in terms of women’s well-being.
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