The effect of violent crime on female decision-making within the household: evidence from the Mexican war on drugs

Male employment and female intra-household decision-making: a Mexican gold mining case study

“…Next, I exclude municipalities with high levels of violence, specifically those in the 75 th percentile according to the homicide rate. I do so to check if more violent municipalities downward biased the main female decision-making power estimates given the positive correlation between gold mining and drug-related violence, and subsequently, the documented negative effect of violence on women’s intra-household bargaining power (see Tsaneva et al 2018 ). The results from this analysis provide some indication that the main coefficient of a woman’s decision-making power in Table 1 is underestimated, as excluding violent municipalities increases the estimated coefficient by 0.001 when compared to the baseline estimate of 0.005.…”

“…It is crucial to control for municipality homicide rates as higher homicide rates have been found to lower women’s bargaining power at home (see Tsaneva et al 2018 ). 20 Due to the drug war, the Mexican mining industry grew in its susceptibility to drug-related criminal activity as the rising gold prices and concurrently declining profitability of drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States stimulated drug cartels to switch from trafficking to gold mining (Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GIATOC) 2016 ).…”

The Long-term Effects of Violent Conflict on Women’s Intra-Household Decision-Making Power

“…Firstly, for each of the four items we create a dummy variable equal to 1 if the woman is either the sole decision-maker or she and her husband/partner jointly are decision-makers, and 0 otherwise. This is one of the most common approaches used in studies analysing decision-making power (see Heath and Tan, 2015;Majlesi, 2016 andTsaneva et al, 2019).…”

“…Firstly, this paper adds to a much broader literature that examines the determinants of women's intra-household decision-making power, such as women's labour market status (Anderson and Eswaran, 2009;Heath and Tan, 2015;Majlesi, 2016), gender norms (Mabsout and van Staveren, 2010), household structure (Debnath, 2015) and asset ownership (Allendorf, 2007;Mishra and Sam, 2016). Our paper adds to this literature by drawing attention to the relationship between women's exposure to violent conflict in childhood and intra-household bargaining power in adulthood (La Tsaneva et al 2019).…”

“…Despite growing evidence on the consequences of exposure to violent conflict, there has been limited research on the relationship between early-life exposure to civil conflict and women's decision-making power in adulthood specifically. Studies by La and Tsaneva et al (2019) investigate the relationship between violent conflict and women's intrahousehold bargaining power in Rwanda and Mexico, respectively. Both studies find evidence of a negative relationship between women's exposure to violent conflict in adulthood and women's decision-making power in the household, but they do not study the longer-term implications of early-life exposure to conflict.…”