Income hiding and informal redistribution: A lab-in-the-field experiment in Senegal

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Boltz, Marie; Marazyan, Karine; Villar, Paola
• 署名单位: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); CNRS - Institute for Humanities & Social Sciences (INSHS); heSam Universite; Universite Pantheon-Sorbonne; University of Namur; Paris School of Economics
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3878
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2018.11.004
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 78-92
• 关键词: Income observability; Informal redistribution; Extended families; Resource allocation decisions; Lab-in-the-field experiment; AFRICA

摘要

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.