Taken together, our results suggest that promoting cooperation between spouses may have larger, statistically significant and positive impacts on household welfare outcomes compared to boosting wives’ empowerment, as proxied by the share of female controlled income in disjoint income. Recalling the predictions of the theoretical model, we expect relatively larger gains from intrahousehold cooperation versus wives’ empowerment where both spouses receive relatively high utility from household public goods, and where current norms limit the ability of husbands to exercise control over their wives’ incomes.

Interestingly, Njuki et al. (2013) investigate women’s empowerment in rural areas of 6 countries, and report findings that help put our findings into a broader context. The authors estimate that rural Malawian women are more empowered than their counterparts in the other five countries included in the study, both in terms of an overall empowerment index as well as most of the index subcomponents. Even though only 23 percent of the sampled rural Malawian women are considered fully empowered, 72 percent reported being self-confident; 53 percent reported having held a leadership position; and strikingly, 64 percent reported having either sole or joint control over household income and expenditures. Additionally, only 6.8 percent of the sample reported that they supported the statement: “there are times when a woman deserves to be hit.” This evidence suggests that the prevailing social norms and customs in Malawi could support women’s income generation and limit husbands’ ability to control that income.

Returning to the theoretical model, our results are also consistent with outcomes that arise when relaxing model assumptions. For instance, we assume that the wife suffers greater labor costs as her ability to control labor income is reduced. If this is not the case, then her labor supply would only be weakly increasing, as captured in the model of Heath and Tan (2016). Additionally, allowing for the husband to choose his labor supply could lead to insignificant impacts on total labor income, to the extent that husbands reduce their labor in response to increase in their wives’ labor. While the IHPS labor data are quite rich, they are not sufficiently exhaustive to directly test for the impacts of control over income on days of labor supplied across the number of labor categories observed in the data set.

# **6.  Concluding Comments**

This paper began by reviewing the theoretical and empirical developments in the women’s empowerment literature, and its influence on donor policy. Though Boserup was concerned with potential development pathways that could lead to both reduced women’s welfare as well as inefficient production and slower development, the emphasis in donor policy as well as empirical research has been overwhelmingly on promoting and evaluating women’s empowerment in the allocation of resources, with little attention to production inefficiencies and slower development. This emphasis makes sense for two reasons. First, the equitable access to resources inherent in the women’s empowerment strategies is an important basic human right to support in and of itself.

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