COVID-19, Crises and Women's Control of Resources: Evidence from Mexico

This paper examines the relationship between crises and the intra-household allocation of resources. Using data from Mexico, I estimate a structural collective model to identify the distribution of household resources among its members. Then, I construct a proxy for women’s bargaining power based on their control of resources and document how it evolves over periods of economic stability and contraction. The results indicate that during the COVID-19 crisis, women's control over household resources declined by approximately 4-5 percentage points compared to non-recession periods and by 6-8 percentage points relative to the financial crisis, with a more pronounced effect for households with children. I further analyze how this resource reallocation affects individual poverty. The findings highlight the heterogeneous behavior of intra-household inequality over the business cycle. It also suggests that the hypothesis that the financial crisis was a “man-cession” and the COVID-19 crisis was a “she-cession” holds in terms of intra-household resource allocation.