TY - JOUR
T1 - Income hiding and informal redistribution
T2 - A lab-in-the-field experiment in Senegal
AU - Villar, Paola
AU - Boltz, Marie
AU - Marazyan, Karine
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2019/3/1
Y1 - 2019/3/1
N2 - We estimate the hidden cost of social obligations to redistribute exploiting data from a controlled setting in urban Senegal, which combines lab-in-the-field measures and out-of-lab follow-up data. We estimate a social tax of about 9 percent. When given the opportunity to get hidden income, individuals decrease by 26 percent the share of gains they transfer to kin — mostly outside the household — and increase health and personal expenses. We expand on prior literature by both identifying the individual cost of informal redistribution and then relating it to postexperiment resource-allocation decisions, and by disentangling intra- and interhousehold redistributive pressure.
AB - We estimate the hidden cost of social obligations to redistribute exploiting data from a controlled setting in urban Senegal, which combines lab-in-the-field measures and out-of-lab follow-up data. We estimate a social tax of about 9 percent. When given the opportunity to get hidden income, individuals decrease by 26 percent the share of gains they transfer to kin — mostly outside the household — and increase health and personal expenses. We expand on prior literature by both identifying the individual cost of informal redistribution and then relating it to postexperiment resource-allocation decisions, and by disentangling intra- and interhousehold redistributive pressure.
KW - income observability
KW - informal redistribution
KW - extended families
KW - resource allocation decision
KW - lab-in-the-field experiment
KW - Africa
KW - Informal redistribution
KW - Resource allocation decisions
KW - Extended families
KW - Lab-in-the-field experiment
KW - Income observability
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85058093528&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2018.11.004
DO - 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2018.11.004
M3 - Article
SN - 0304-3878
VL - 137
SP - 78
EP - 92
JO - Journal of Development Economics
JF - Journal of Development Economics
ER -