This paper examines whether a woman's power relative to her husband's affects decisions about use of prenatal and delivery care in Indonesia. Measures of power that span economic and social domains are considered. Holding household resources constant, control over "economic" resources by a woman affects the couple's decision-making. Relative to a woman with no assets that she perceives as being her own, a woman with some share of household assets influences reproductive health decisions. Evidence suggests these decisions also vary if a woman is better educated than her husband, comes from a higher social status background than her husband, or if her father is better educated than her father-in-law.We conclude that both economic and social dimensions of the distribution of power between spouses influence decision-making and that it is useful to conceptualize power as multi-dimensional in understanding the behavior of couples.Although reproductive health and family planning programs provide services with potentially numerous benefits for women and their families, uptake of services offered by these programs is far from universal, even in settings where services are widely available at subsidized prices. Recent efforts to understand barriers to service use have recognized that although women are typically the primary point of contact for reproductive health programs, the decisions that lead women to adopt services occur within the context of a marriage, a household, or a family (Becker, 1996). If a woman and her partner differ in the extent to which they value reproductive health services, then use of those services will be the result of a negotiation between the couple, with the outcome reflecting each person's perception of the value of the services relative to their costs and the relative power of individuals in asserting their own preferences in decision-making.The emphasis of this study is on the association between a series of indicators of the relative power of a man and woman within a couple and the woman's reproductive health behaviors in Indonesia. We focus on the use of prenatal care and choice of location of delivery. These outcomes are of special interest in Indonesia, where maternal mortality rates are relatively high.

This article explores motivations for intergenerational exchanges of time and money using data from Indonesia. The extent of exchange and underlying motivations differ across families but substantial evidence supports the theory that transfers within families serve as insurance for family members. The results also suggest that between some parents and children money is exchanged for time. Additionally, some evidence is consistent with the idea that parents pay for their children's education partly as a loan that is later repaid. The authors compare their results to those that they obtained previously for Malaysia using similar data and methods. The findings regarding motivations for transfers are remarkably similar across the two countries.

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The extent to which education provides protection in the face of a large-scale natural disaster is investigated. Using longitudinal population-representative survey data collected in two provinces on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, before and after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, we examine changes in a broad array of indicators of well-being of adults. Focusing on adults who were living, before the tsunami, in areas that were subsequently severely damaged by the tsunami, better educated males were more likely to survive the tsunami, but education is not predictive of survival among females. Education is not associated with levels of post-traumatic stress among survivors 1 year after the tsunami, or with the likelihood of being displaced. Where education does appear to play a role is with respect to coping with the disaster over the longer term. The better educated were far less likely than others to live in a camp or other temporary housing, moving, instead, to private homes, staying with family or friends, or renting a new home. The better educated were more able to minimize dips in spending levels following the tsunami, relative to the cuts made by those with little education. Five years after the tsunami, the better educated were in better psycho-social health than those with less education. In sum, education is associated with higher levels of resilience over the longer term.

Data from three waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) are used to examine attrition in the context of a large scale panel survey conducted in a low income setting. Household-level attrition between the baseline and first follow-up four years later is 6%; the cumulative attrition between the baseline and second follow-up after a five year hiatus is 5%. Attrition is low in the IFLS because movers are followed: around 12% of households that were interviewed had moved from their location at baseline. About half of those households were "local movers". The other half, many of whom had moved to a new province, were interviewed during a second sweep through the study areas ("2 nd stage tracking"). Regression analyses indicate that in terms of household-level characteristics at baseline, households interviewed during "2 nd stage tracking" are very similar to those not interviewed in the follow-up surveys. Local movers are more similar to the households found in the baseline location in the follow-ups. The results suggest that the information content of households interviewed during "2 nd tracking" is probably high. The costs of following those respondents is relatively modest in the IFLS. We conclude that tracking movers is likely to be a good investment in longitudinal households surveys conducted in settings where communication infrastructure is limited.