Last updated on June 14, 2015
I have blogged about this paper a few times before (see here, here, here, and here in case you want to trace the development of this paper into its final, accepted form), but given that it was accepted last week by and is now forthcoming in the Journal of Development Economics, I thought I should have one final post on it. You can find the accepted version here, and here is the abstract:
Why does female genital cutting (FGC) persist in certain places but has declined elsewhere? We study the persistence of FGC—proxied for by whether survey respondents are in favor of the practice continuing—in West Africa. We use 38 repeated cross-sectional country-year data sets covering 310,613 women aged 15 to 49 in 13 West African countries for the period 1995-2013. The data exhibit sufficient within-household variation to allow controlling for the unobserved heterogeneity between households, which in turn allows determining how much variation is due to factors at the levels of the individual, household, village, and beyond. Our results show that on average, 87 percent of the variation in FGC persistence can be attributed to household- and individual-level factors, with contributions from those levels of variation ranging from 71 percent in Nigeria in 2011 to 93 percent in Burkina Faso in 2006. Our results also suggest that once invariant factors across women aged 15 to 49 in the same household are accounted for, women who report having undergone FGC in West Africa are on average 16 percentage points more likely to be in favor of the practice.
“Is this really economics?,” some may ask. Actually, if you think about it, the answer is yes, and this is a question we address in the paper as follows:
The practice of FGC is of economic interest for a number of reasons. First, given the physiological and psychological consequences of FGC discussed above, FGC is likely to have real consequences on the health, educational attainment, labor market outcomes, and productivity of women in societies where the practice is widespread, which means that FGC can contribute to underdevelopment. Second, there is a substantial line of research in economics focusing on how social norms emerge and evolve. For North (1990), a social norm like FGC is an institution, a “humanly devised constraint that shape[s] human interaction,” and “structure[s] incentives in human exchange, whether political, social, or economic” (North, 1990:3). For Ellickson (1989, 1991), social norms emerge and evolve so as to minimize transaction costs and maximize social welfare. Third, FGC is often associated with (and seemingly sustained by) marriage market prospects: in places where the practice is common, men often expect their future wife to have undergone FGC, and Wagner (2014) finds that women who report having undergone FGC are 40% more likely to get married in the 13 African countries we study. Lastly, understanding what drives the persistence of FGC in different countries can provide some insight about the (potentially nonlinear) dynamics of FGC persistence. Following tipping point and informational cascade models (Schelling, 1978; Bikhchandani et al., 1992; Bikhchandani et al., 1998), the decision to abandon FGC might follow a logistic growth path, and so in places where the practice is widespread the decision to abandon FGC might be entirely be due to individual-level factors, whereas it might be increasingly driven by higher-level (e.g., village, region, country) factors as the practice becomes less common, perhaps reverting back to becoming an individual-level decision when the practice becomes very uncommon. Consequently, we conclude by using our results to speculate as to whether this is the case for FGC in West Africa, finding that it is not.
To my and my coauthors’ knowledge, this is one of the first few papers published in economics about the institution (in a Northian sense, as explained above) of female genital cutting. The other one is Natascha Wagner’s article in the Journal of Development Studies on the long-term health consequences of FGC.
That said, there are now a good number of people working on this topic in economics, and I expect many more articles on FGC to be published in economics over the next five to ten years, and I am working on two or three new articles on this topic, along with coauthors old and new.