Beware: A Woman Is Looking after Your Car

Abstract

There has been little research on the association between behaviors, gender and usufruct rights in informal settings. Using a unique database from an underprivileged population, who informally look after cars parked in the streets, we analyze the behaviors women and men exhibit when they interact with other people in the street. We find that men tend to commit acts of physical aggression more than women when they have to defend their usufruct right. But, surprisingly, though theory and applied literature suggests the contrary, we found that women are more likely to react aggressively than men, when drivers underpay in this voluntary payment market. Building a Type Index of cuidacoches (indicator of attitude and external appearance), we explore association between aggressive behavior and this Type Index.

The Effect of One-On-One Assistance on the Compliance with Labor Regulation. A Field Experiment in Extremely Vulnerable Settings

“…We have been studying the cuidacoches' market since 2013, and collected, built and analyzed a data base of about 700 cuidacoches Cid, 2014, andBlanco, Cabrera &Cid, 2016). This previous research has helped us to explore hypotheses and mechanisms, in order to design the present field experiment.…”

“…Figure 2 shows a global view of the city with the 88 zones selected for the experiment. To implement the design, we exploit two previous surveys that we conducted in our prior research agenda (Cabrera & Cid, 2014;Blanco, Cabrera, & Cid, 2016). In those surveys we collected the distribution of cuidacoches across Montevideo.…”

“…To increase power, we balance on a vector of three variables at zone level which are likely to affect the rate of compliance with the legal requirements. These are: a) the number of cuidacoches in each cell (obtained from the databases built by Cabrera and Cid, 2014, and by Blanco, Cabrera and Cid, 2016); b) the number area of the cell, which is associated with the number of street blocks; and c) the number of cars in the cell (obtained by the Continuous Household Survey of Uruguay). Randomization is implemented via stratification in this vector of variables.…”

“…It is estimated that the population of cuidacoches in Montevideo is about 3,000, and only about 1,500 of them have the legal permit required by the municipality (Blanco, Cabrera, & Cid, 2016). If no intervention is applied, it is expected that at most 8 percent of the illegal cuidacoches end up getting a legal permit (1,500 x 0.08 = 120 cuidacoches).…”

“…The police protects me if someone tries to take me out of the block 0.24 0.43 0.00 1.00 327 Note: The number of cuidacoches in each cell come from Blanco, Cabrera and Cid (2016). The number of cells is 88 (42 correspond to "Control" (C), 23 to "Treatment 1" (T1) and 23 to "Treatment 2" (T2)).…”