# **4.2 Intra-household labor allocation**

This section unpacks the intra-household composition of the observed reduction in agricultural labor provision as a result of the intervention, as well as its determinants, testing the predictions in Section 2. We restrict attention to the 1,834 married producers with complete time-use data for spouses.<sup>18</sup> Table 7 shows that the oxen had different impacts for different household members, with time on household plots decreasing for women and girls. Columns 1 and 2 show that assignment to treatment had no significant impacts on the producer’s time use. Columns 3-8 show that treatment households decreased the time spent on household plots by almost 6% and 9% for wives and girls, respectively. The large decrease in household plot activities for girls represents around two-thirds of a larger decrease in their total reported active time.<sup>19</sup> In this table, we report results for both the first spouse and other spouses for polygamous households. The impact of the treatment on time use, including household plot activities, is not statistically different between first spouse (column 4) and other spouses (column 6). Results on other spouses being noisier but equivalent to results on first spouse, the rest of the paper studies the average impact of treatment on spouses, by taking the average of outcomes across the producer’s wives, when applicable. Finally, boys in treatment households increased time spent on household chores by almost 0.6 hours, representing an increase of over 30%.<sup>20</sup> These findings speak directly to our model: the significant decrease in female plot labor supports the presence of sizable social prescriptions dictating that women should not handle traction oxen ( _a f >_ 0). Relatedly, the lack of significant impacts on domestic work suggests a near-zero response of the marginal product of labor to a capital shock ( _HTK ≈_ 0). We examine the ambiguous observed impact on non-farm labor in more detail in Section 4.3, below, by exploiting district variation in social prescriptions regarding women working with oxen ( _a f_ ( _K − K_ )).

Building on the decreased time women and girls spend on household plots, Tables 8 and 9 examine treatment effects for education and health outcomes. Panel A of Table 8 shows that the program did not increase either overall school enrollment for children aged 6-16 years old or student performance on a simple literacy and numeracy assessment. However, this may have been a tall order, since it would have required many older children to enroll in school for the first time or to return to school after having dropped out previously. With this in mind, Panel B examines whether the oxen increased the likelihood that students who had previously

> 18Appendix C presents results equivalent to those presented above, showing that this sub-sample is balanced across the range of socio-demographic characteristics examined in section 3.1 and that the estimated impacts on household agricultural outcomes are consistent with those presented for the full sample, above, but less precisely estimated.

> 19The omitted category in the time use questionnaire is passive rest time that is not spent on hobbies or socializing. A reduction likely indicates an increase in rest, but may also stem from the fact that the treatment shifts these individuals away from household plots, decreasing the observability of their time use to the producer. Appendix Table B4 presents equivalent results for average weekly hours spent on household agricultural plots over the prior year, showing a similar pattern of decreased time on plots by women and girls.

> 20The low reported time spent on education for girls and boys is likely due to the timing of the survey, which took place during the summer school break.

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