The Risk of Polygamy and Wives' Saving Behaviour

Marie Boltz (1, 2) , Isabelle Chort (3)

1 PSE - Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques
2 PSE - Paris School of Economics
3 LEDa - Laboratoire d'Economie de Dauphine

In a polygamous society, all monogamous women are virtually at risk of polygamy. However,both the anthropological and economic literature are silent on the potential impact of therisk of polygamy on economic decisions of monogamous wives. We explore this issue forSenegal using individual panel data. We rst estimate a Cox model for the probability oftransition to polygamy. Second, we estimate the impact of the predicted risk of polygamyon monogamous wives' savings. We nd a positive impact of the risk of polygamy on femalesavings entrusted to formal or informal institutions, consistent with self-insurance strategies.

Mots clés: survival analysis; savings; informal insurance strategy; Polygamy; labour supply; intra-household resource allocation

Domaines: Économie et finance quantitative [q-fin]

Marie Boltz, Isabelle Chort. The Risk of Polygamy and Wives' Saving Behaviour. Annual International Conference 2015 of the Research Group on Development Economics of the German Economic Association : "Development Economics and Policy", Jun 2015, Kiel, Germany. ⟨hal-01515934⟩