Women born in 1935 went to college significantly less than their male counterparts and married women’s labor force participation (LFP) averaged 40% between the ages of thirty and forty. The cohort born twenty years later behaved very differently. The education gender gap was eliminated and married women’s LFP averaged 70% over the same ages. In order to evaluate the quantitative contributions of the many significant changes in the economic environment, family structure, and social norms that occurred over this period, this paper develops a dynamic life-cycle model calibrated to data relevant to the 1935 cohort. We find that the higher probability of divorce and the changes in wage structure faced by the 1955 cohort are each able to explain, in isolation, a large proportion (about 60%) of the observed changes in female LFP. After combining all economic and family structure changes, we find that a simple change in preferences towards work can account for the remaining change in LFP. To eliminate the education gender gap requires, on the other hand, for the psychic cost of obtaining higher education to change asymmetrically for women versus men.
Why has the expansion of women's economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question, focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and declining fertility) exacerbated the tension in men's conflicting interests as husbands versus fathers, ultimately resolving them in favor of the latter. As husbands, men stood to gain from their privileged position in a patriarchal world whereas, as fathers, they were hurt by a system that afforded few rights to their daughters. The model predicts that declining fertility would hasten reform of women's property rights whereas legal systems that were initially more favorable to women would delay them. The theoretical relationship between capital and the relative attractiveness of reform is non-monotonic but growth inevitably leads to reform. I explore the empirical validity of the theoretical predictions by using cross-state variation in the US in the timing of married women obtaining property and earning rights between 1850 and 1920.
This paper compares the allocative properties of markets and exams in an environment in which students differ in wealth and ability and schools differ in quality. In the presence of borrowing constraints, exams are shown to dominate markets in terms of matching efficiency. Whether aggregate consumption is greater under exams than under markets depends on the power of the exam technology; for a sufficiently powerful test, exams dominate markets in terms of aggregate consumption as well. The effects of income taxation are analyzed and the optimal allocation scheme when wealth is observable is derived. The latter consists of allowing markets to set school prices but having the government allocate fellowships based both on financial need and exam score.
Slides from Marshall Lecture Presentation, August 2006.
These are the slides I presented for the Marshall Lecture, EEA, Vienna, August 2006. They discuss the epidemiological approach as a way to separate the effect of institutions and other traditional economic variables from culture; they summarize research on the effect of culture on the work behavior of women; they introduce a model of culture as learning to explain the evolution of US female LFP over a century and show a simulation; lastly, they discuss open research questions.
For a discussion of the epidemiological approach, see the Palgrave Dictionary article (Fernández 2007). For the research on women and work see Culture: An Empirical Investigation of Beliefs, Work, and Fertility (Fernández and Fogli 2009) and Women, Work and Culture (Fernández 2007). The latter paper contains much of the material presented in these slides. It also introduces new evidence on culture and women's work based on answers to WVS questions about attitudes towards women across European countries using an epidemiological approach. Lastly, a quantitative model of culture as learning, along the lines sketched in the slides, is developed in Culture as Learning: The Evolution of Female Labor Force Participation over a Century (Fernández 2007). |
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