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The Reversal of the Gender Education Gap with Economic Development (with Jie Ren and Michelle Rendall) - Apr 2025
The Reversal of the Gender Education Gap with Economic Development (with Jie Ren and Michelle Rendall) - Apr 2025
press coverage: VoxEU, VoxDev, Faculti Interview
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.
Draft coming soon! (with Leandro De Magalhaes, Liyuan Dong, Albert Rodriguez Sala, Raül Santaeulàlia-Llopis)
Draft coming soon! (with Leandro De Magalhaes, Liyuan Dong, Albert Rodriguez Sala, Raül Santaeulàlia-Llopis)
We collect panel data on income, consumption, bilateral transfers, and kin linkage for a full sample of villagers in Malawi, covering five waves of 387 distinct households between 2022 and 2024. Using this data set, we document an active informal transfer network, with households engaging in an average of 0.8 weekly inter-household food and monetary transfers. While 64\% of transfers occur among kin, transfers between kin do not respond to negative income shocks. Among all transfers, only transfers from ganyu labor response to negative income shocks, while other types of transfers, including those from the government, NGO, and remittances, do not. To interpret these findings, we develop a model in which individuals derive utility from both consumption and “warm-glow” transfers. Model estimation suggests that transfers among kin are more responsive to inequality than those between non-kin pairs.
The Impact of Entrepreneurial Risk Aversion on Wages in General Equilibrium (with James E. Rauch) - Mar 2015
The Impact of Entrepreneurial Risk Aversion on Wages in General Equilibrium (with James E. Rauch) - Mar 2015
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.
Selected Work in Progress
Selected Work in Progress
(with Tatjana Kleineberg, Tommaso Porzio, and Radine Rafols)
(with Tatjana Kleineberg, Tommaso Porzio, and Radine Rafols)
(with Jie Ren, Michelle Rendall, and Ronald Wolthoff)
(with Jie Ren, Michelle Rendall, and Ronald Wolthoff)
(with Chaoran Chen, Dennis Tao Yang, and Xiaodong Zhu)
(with Chaoran Chen, Dennis Tao Yang, and Xiaodong Zhu)
(with Emin Dinlersoz and Yueyuan Ma)
(with Emin Dinlersoz and Yueyuan Ma)
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