Sustained gains in women's educational attainment and labor force participation rates have led to dual-earner couples becoming a dominant feature of marriage formation in advanced democracies. Despite this, women still earn less than men in many such couples in a context where the likelihood of a marriage ending in divorce is relatively high. The literature links this persisting pattern of earning imbalance within heterosexual couples to gendered social norms that prescribe unpaid household care work as the wife's work to market providers more affordable to dual-earner households can correct this imbalance. We test this by providing evidence on whether decreasing the price of child daycare services reduces the prevalence of the earning imbalance favoring men in dual-earner households. In so doing, we leverage a unique daycare subsidy program in the Canadian province of Quebec, which substantially reduced the price of daycare services for children aged 59 months or less as of 2000. We use a synthetic control estimator to identify the causal effect of this intervention on the share of dual-earner households in which the woman is the lesser earner. The comparison of actual and counterfactual shares of such households shows that this intervention reduced the prevalence of earning imbalances favoring men by an average of 13.74% after 2000. Several robustness checks and placebo tests confirm this finding, suggesting that family-work policies can reduce couples' gender income inequality.
Despite their reduction, the persistence of achievement gaps between white and black students is a concerning problem. The literature devoted to the role of nutrition in improving school results is based on the implicit assumption that the beneficial effects of recommended nutritional elements, such as milk, are homogeneous among schoolchildren. However, behind this favorable image lies a genetic and cultural complexity that shapes individuals' reactions to this dairy product. Studies in anthropology and medicine have demonstrated the genetic evolution of certain groups of individuals following cultural practices such as agriculture or animal domestication. Indeed, studies have shown that the persistence of lactase - the ability to absorb the good nutrients contained in milk - is less frequent in individuals from Asian, indigenous, and certain African groups. This genetic evolution leads to lactose intolerance, which can have heterogeneous effects on an individual's health, ranging from simple indigestion to severe abdominal pain or hospitalization. This study examines the potential impact of promoting milk consumption on racial inequalities in educational outcomes in a racially diverse population of schoolchildren. We analyze the impact of the "Got Milk?" campaign introduced in California in 1993 and examine the link between nutrition, public health, and education, focusing mainly on educational outcomes and disparities between racial groups in the USA.