Male employment and female intra-household decision-making: a Mexican gold mining case study
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Male employment and female intra-household decision-making: a Mexican gold mining case study 1,2
Audrey Au Yong Lyn
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Received: 1 May 2020 / Accepted: 15 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020; This article is published with open access
Abstract This study explores the effect of economic booms in male-dominated industries like mining on female intra-household decision-making power. Using the 2007–2008 global financial crisis as an exogenous event which led to a gold mining boom in Mexico, I find that women living in gold endowed municipalities experienced higher decision-making power contrary to some theoretical predictions. These results appear to be consistent with unitary household bargaining models which assume income pooling, as female decisionmaking power increased despite no changes in female labor force participation and an observed increase in male employment. Findings from a separate survey additionally show that while women residing in gold endowed states had higher decision-making power, they were also more likely to suffer from intimate partner violence (IPV). This suggests that a woman’s intra-household decision-making authority is not necessarily negatively correlated with her risk of IPV as posited in feminist theory. Keywords Gold mining Intra-household decision making Global income shocks Male employment ●
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JEL-Codes J12 D13 F62 L72 ●
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1 Introduction Mexico has a long-standing history of gold mining, where the practice of mining gold dates back to the pre-Hispanic times and contributed greatly to Latin America’s economic expansion during the colonial era. It was not until the last two decades however, that the Mexican gold mining industry took off. Prior to the 2000s, Mexico
* Audrey Au Yong Lyn [email protected] 1
ETH Zurich, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, Leonhardstrasse 21, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland
2
Munich Graduate School of Economics (MGSE), Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Kaulbachstrasse 45, 80539 Munich, Germany
A. Au Yong Lyn
predominantly focused on silver production, as the country had traditionally been the number one producer of the world’s silver. Due to market speculation of the impending 2007–2008 financial crisis, global gold prices started increasing in 2003 and spiked sharply between 2006 and 2011, with Mexican gold production following the same trend. This event, together with the influx of foreign direct investments (FDI) for mining explorations, inevitably generated a shift in focus from silver to gold mining in Mexico during this time period (Secretaría de Economía, 2013).1 According to the National Institute for Statistics and Geography (INEGI), the production of gold in Mexico increased three-fold at an average rate of about 5.3% each year between 2000 and 2011. Relative to the world however, Mexico’s global share in gold production during the mining boom only increased from about 0.3% in 2000 to 2.8% in 2011 (The Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC)). Notwithstanding, Mexico’s rich endowment in precious metals like gold in
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