Paper short abstract:

We use network data collected as part of the 2016 Socioeconomic Profile of Rural India (SEPRI) survey. We focus on the networks of women and examine the role of network structure in determining the number of dimensions over which women take decisions within the household

Paper long abstract:

We use network data collected as part of the 2016 Socioeconomic Profile of Rural India (SEPRI) survey. It contains data for 214,338 adult members from 89,398 households spread across 192 villages of 14 states where each member is asked to mention 4 others from the village from whom they could borrow Rs 10,000. We first document how women's and men's networks differ from each other. In particular, we focus on network overlap and clustering. Overlap is defined for a husband and wife if they name the same household as a source of loan. We find that overlaps occur in 19,223 households providing sufficient variation for examining its impact on the extent and the depth of women's agency within the household. Clustering measures whether two people named as friends are themselves friends of each other.

Our primary goal is to examine the role of network structure in determining the number of dimensions over which women take decisions within the household. We merge the member-level data with household-level information that includes identifiers on a variety of measures such as income, education level, jati grouping, participation in local governance and workfare programs - to name a few. We use information from the male and female networks to see if there are any differences in social capital which drive a woman's empowerment as measured by her decision making ability within the household.