orthogonality test is that both the unsuspected and suspected instruments are valid. The instruments never fail to pass this test, as indicated by the statistically insignificant orthogonality test statistics. In addition, our instruments take on coefficients that carry anticipated signs and that are statistically significant at the 1 percent level in the first stage estimation, whose results are reported in Table 3, column B. The p-values associated with the under-identification test statistics also signal the fulfillment of the instrumental relevance requirement. The KleibergenPaap rk Wald F statistics from the weak identification tests stand at 12.03, which lies in between the Cragg-Donald F statistic critical values (under i.i.d. errors) of 9.08 and 13.91 for 5 percent and 10 percent instrumental variable relative bias, respectively (Stock and Yogo, 2005).

# **5.3.    Robustness Checks**

In this section, we consider a number of robustness checks, which are reported in Tables A3, A4 and A5 of the Appendix. First, we note that the leadership-community similarity indices that are in part informed by the focus group composition (which is assumed to reflect the leadership in the community) are closely related to the size of the focus group. Since the timing of the interview throughout the 13-month period of fieldwork, and spatial differences in opportunity cost of participating in the focus group, may have implications for the size and composition of the focus group, we included as additional control variables the interview month fixed effects and the community median ganyu (i.e. casual labor) daily wage rate computed from individuallevel reporting as part of the Time Use and Labour Module of the Household Questionnaire. The estimates reported in Tables 3 and 4 are robust to the inclusion of these controls.

A further concern may be raised specifically on the exogeneity of the share of female members in the total membership across health committees, education committees and parent-teacher associations. While we defined the variable in the context of non-directly productive groups that are less likely to influence the dependent variables, it may be closely correlated with the variable defined in terms of more directly productive groups, such as village development committee, tobacco clubs, farmer groups, agricultural cooperatives, business associations and savings and credit cooperatives. The results from the preferred specification are robust to using only the similarity indices as the instrumental variables, and the resulting decline in the weak identification F-statistics is negligible.

Despite the scope of the control variables and the arguments presented in Section 4.5, one might still assert that our instruments may be related to the degree to which a community is progressive, is able to spur innovation, and/or lacks institutional inertia. If true, these unobserved factors would affect the outcomes of interest and the exclusion restriction would be violated. To counteract this potential criticism, we introduce additional independent variables into equations 6 and 7, and test the robustness of our estimates from the preferred specification. One of the controls is the average share of lifetime in community computed across the focus group 25