Female Empowerment: Impact of a Commitment Savings Product in the Philippines

out of other assets; (2) impact on household decision making and savings attitudes; and (3)
impact on economic decisions, such as purchase of durable goods, health and consumption.

III. Impact on Household Decision Making and Self-Perception of Savings Behavior

Household Decision Making Power

We first examine whether being offered the SEED account changed the decision making roles
in the household. In the follow-up survey, we ask questions regarding family planning, financial
and consumption decisions in order to ascertain the structure of spousal or familial control within
married households. For each decision category, we record whether the principle decision-maker
is the respondent, the spouse, or both. Responses are assigned values of two, zero and one,
respectively. We construct two decision making indices from the nine categories: (1) equally-
weighted mean of each response given, and (2) a linear combination, determined through a factor
analysis, of the individual responses to each question (Pitt, Khandker and Cartwright 2003). The
nine categories are decisions on what to buy at the market, expensive purchases, giving assistance
to family members, family purchases, recreational use of the money, personal use of the money,
number of children, schooling of children, and use of family planning. ¹¹

Table 2, Panel B shows the impact of treatment assignment on household decision making for
married women, as measured by the two indices mentioned above.¹² We find that assignment to
the treatment group leads to a 0.14 standard deviation increase in the first (equally-weighted)
decision making index (Table 2, Panel B, Column 1), and a 0.25 standard deviation increase in

¹¹ See Pitt, Khandker and Cartwight (2003) for a discussion of alternative constructions of a household
decision making index. Our results are robust to summing across the measures, and to specifications that
measure changes, rather than controlling for baseline levels as we report in the text. Furthermore, since the
factor analysis drops observations for which any answer is missing, we also examine the first measure of
equal weights but omitting all observations for which any one answer is missing. Results for the equally-
weighted mean index do not change on this smaller sample of individuals.

¹² This applies to married women whose spouses live at home with them. 53 out of 696 married women
had no spouse in the house in both baseline and follow-up; 24 out of 541 married men had no spouse
during both surveys. These married individuals were not included in our analysis.

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