Smartphone use, off‐farm employment, and women's decision‐making power: Evidence from rural China.

Empowering women is an important goal of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, and studies have proposed various strategies to achieve this goal. However, few have examined the role of smartphone use in empowering women in decision‐making and its mechanism. Therefore, this study analyzes how smartphone use affects women's decision‐making power and explores whether this influence is due to women's off‐farm employment mechanisms. For this purpose, the study uses the survey data of 1110 households in rural China and the endogenous treatment regression model for analysis. The control function approach addresses the selection bias of off‐farm employment. The results show that smartphone use significantly increases women's decision‐making power, partially channeled through increasing women's off‐farm employment. The mechanism effect is robust to using both binary and intensive measurements of off‐farm employment. Therefore, a policy to improve access to internet facilities and smartphone use could improve women's decision‐making power through employment in the off‐farm sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Review of Development Economics is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)