Women and household cash management: evidence from financial diaries in India

Abstract

Using an innovative data-set that involved 90 poor women logging-in daily household financial diaries for a period of eleven months in 2008-09 in the town of Ramanagaram, Karnataka, India; we address the following question - do women use money differently from men? Comparing weekly cash-expenses of 19 women headed households with similar male-headed households; we arrived at several nuanced conclusions. For example, among the poorest households, women showed greater tendency towards spending household cash on food-items and they had lower spending on fuel and entertainment as compared to the male-headed households. Among the micro-finance borrowers in our sample, the poorest among the women headed households showed a spending on jewelry, in contrast to the borrowers in the male headed households spending on household assets. Financial diaries data being more fine-grained and detailed than one-off surveys, allows us to generalize these results for the urban-poor working in the informal sector in India.