accepting a promotion for the women, house repairs and purchases of large appliances.<sup>48</sup> The affected domains therefore encompass both decisions that primarily affect the women themselves as well as important decisions that affect the entire household. In terms of changes in the decisionmaking progress, the selected women appear to have gained more power by becoming a party to decisions that they have not previously been privy to, as opposed to becoming an equal partner in joint decision-making or being able to make decisions on their own.<sup>49</sup>

# **4.3 Expenditures**

The women selected for the promotion program are able to translate their increased involvement in intra-household decision-making into increased expenditures on female assignable goods and remittances. The households of the selected women spend 2.71 percentage points more of household income on women’s goods and 1.22 percentage points more on girls’ goods than the households of the nominated women, as shown in columns (1) and (2) in Panel C of Table 3. These effects are large at about 51% and 74% of the mean in the nominated group, respectively. Column (5) also shows a large effect on remittances, of 3.48 percentage points or 58% of the comparison group mean. The sharpened q-values in squared brackets support that these results remain significant even after accounting for multiple hypotheses testing, with the exception of the increase in girls’ expenditures. In contrast, I find noisy null effects on expenditures on male assignable goods, with small, insignificant and —in the case of boys’ expenditures—negative point estimates in columns (3) and (4).<sup>50</sup> The magnitudes of the effects suggest that the selected women are not just able to appropriate any additional income they may earn thanks to the promotion income, but also that a reallocation of the income they would earn in the absence of the program is taking place. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the intent-to-treat impact on female expenditures and remittances combined adds up to about 1,543 Taka.<sup>51</sup> This is far greater than the intent-to-treat increase in personal income of about 689 Taka in Table 3. This suggests that the promotion program leads to renewed bargaining over more than just the newly earned income.

The effect is positive for all components of women’s assignable expenditures, though the effects are largest on expenditures on women’s clothing and footwear as well as accessories and

> 48See Figure B.4 in the Online Appendix. Note that the outcome variables for the separate decisions again are indices, since I dichotomize the four different categories of involvement explained in Section 3 into dummy variables, and then create a standardized Anderson index.

> 49See Figure B.5 in the Online Appendix

> 50Table C.12 in the Online Appendix investigates whether other household expenditures change, such as on food, different type of durables, housing, savings and recreation. None of these expenditures is significantly affected, though the point estimates are sizeable at -0.8 to -0.9 percentage points for kitchen durables, furnishing durables and savings, and +0.8 percentage points for food.

> 51See Table C.11 in the Online Appendix.

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