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Using household surveys covering 83 countries of all income levels, we document that the gender education gap in low-income countries is strikingly large and that it narrows and reverses with economic development. To study the driving forces, we propose a three-sector model in which development features skill-biased technological change, structural change, gender-biased technological change (a reduced form of changing discrimination), changing marriage markets, and varying levels of home productivity. The model is parameterized to match contrasting labor market outcomes by education and gender groups and it does well in matching the patterns of the gender education gap we document. Counterfactual exercises show that the complementarity between skill-biased technological change and structural change explains most of the narrowing gender education gap across the development spectrum.
One of the leading theories of entrepreneurship is that less risk averse individuals become entrepreneurs and more risk averse individuals become their employees. Kihlstrom and Laffont (1979) formalized this insight in an elegant and widely taught general equilibrium model. However, their model has not been further developed. A reason may be that their main comparative static result, that an economy-wide increase in risk aversion lowers the equilibrium wage, appeared to require the assumption that all agents had identical risk aversion index, throwing out their motivating insight and indicating that the model is intractable. In this note we prove this comparative static result on risk aversion and wages in general equilibrium, retaining agent heterogeneity in risk aversion and the endogenous division of agents into less risk averse entrepreneurs and more risk averse workers, without adding any assumptions not already in the original paper.