surveys with the women confirm the positive impacts on women’s involvement in decision-making, female expenditures and remittances.<sup>68</sup> The results for women’s expenditures and remittances are also robust to different OLS and PDS specifications, though I lose significance in some instances, whereas the impacts on the decision-making index in Wave 1 and girls’ assignable expenditures are somewhat more sensitive to specifications. Turning to different outcome variable transformations, the coefficients remain sizeable when I take the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation of the expenditures in units of Taka, though they are all insignificant. Since the inverse hyperbolic sine is a transformation which compresses the distribution similar to a natural logarithm, this again suggests that the effect is concentrated in the upper half of the distribution. The results are also not primarily driven by the trainings offered as part of the promotion program. The impacts remain of similar magnitude for the sub-sample of factories that were not assigned to the selection experiment (except for the decision-making outcome), which shows that the re-rankings of shortlisted candidates as part of the selection experiment are not explaining the results. The training offered to the selected women in soft skills only or hard and soft skills is also not the main driver of the changes in intra-household outcomes, with interaction terms that are insignificant in all but one case.

# **4.5 Mechanisms**

Three pieces of evidence support that the observed effects are not primarily due to Marshallian income effects. First, the magnitudes of the effects suggest that the additional expenditures on female assignable goods and remittances are much larger than the additional income the selected women earn. As mentioned above, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the impact on female expenditures and remittances combined adds up to about 1,543 Taka, which is more than two times larger than the increase in personal income of about 689 Taka.

Second, the null effects on household expenditures on men’s and boys’ assignable goods shown in Table 3 make a pure income effect less likely, though the estimates are noisy. The insignificant effect on men’s expenditures as a share of household income is only an eighth of the significant effect on women’s expenditures of 2.71 percentage points. And while girls’ expenditures increase significantly by 1.22 percentage points, the coefficient for the share spent on boys’ goods is noisy, small and negative. A Marshallian income effect resulting from the woman’s wage

> the survey or refused to be surveyed, such that the number of observations is slightly smaller for husbands than for the wives.

> 68I estimate Equation 1 with the same set of potential control variables, but include survey round fixed effects instead of month fixed effects in the algorithm. For time reasons, the high-frequency surveys asked about assignable goods expenditures for women and girls (and men and boys) combined, and only included questions about remittances to the wife’s family (not the husband’s). It also did not include questions about income, which is why the expenditure outcomes are expressed in Taka per month.

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