Generosity and sharing among villagers: Do women give more?

•We run dictator game experiment in rural villages in Africa to explore generosity among anonymous villagers and sharing within family.•Generosity among anonymous individuals is very low compared to findings in the dictator game literature.•There is high level of sharing within family between husband and wife.•Women are not more generous than men towards anonymous persons.•Women are less likely to share their resources with their spouses than are men.

This paper explores generosity among anonymous villagers and sharing within families using a dictator game field experiment that was carried out in rural villages in Ethiopia. We find that generosity among anonymous villagers is very low compared with the findings in the dictator game literature. On average, the dictators in our sample allocate only 6% of their endowments to anonymous persons in the village, and 73% of the dictators keep all of their endowments to themselves when paired with anonymous persons. However, we found very high levels of sharing between husband and wife. In terms of gender differences, we find that women are not more generous towards anonymous persons, nor are they more likely to share within their families. In fact, there is some evidence, albeit weak, showing that women allocate less to anonymous persons than do men. Additionally, there is strong evidence that women are less likely to share their resources with their spouse than are men.