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Research related to:  Gender

Cultural Change as Learning: The Evolution of Female Labor Force Participation Over a Century.

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his paper investigates the role of changes in culture in generating the dramatic increase in married women’s labor force participation over the last century. It develops a dynamic model of culture in which individuals hold heterogeneous beliefs regarding the relative long-run payoffs for women who work in the market versus the home. These beliefs evolve endogenously via an intergenerational learning process. Women are assumed to learn about the long-term payoffs of working by observing (noisy) private and public signals. This process generically generates the S-shaped figure for female labor force participation found in the data . . . 
Raquel Fernandez

Property Rights and Intra-Household Bargaining

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This paper examines whether an individual-level transfer of property rights increases the individual's bargaining power within the household. The question is analyzed in the context of a housing reform that occurred in China that gave existing tenants the opportunity to purchase the homes that they had been renting from their state employers. The rights to each housing unit were granted to a particular employee, so property rights were de ned at the individual level rather than the household level. The results indicate that transferring ownership rights to men increased household consumption of some male-favored goods and women's time spent on chores. Transferring ownership rights to women decreased household consumption of some male-favored goods.
Shing-Yi Wang

Women's Rights and Development

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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 . . . 
Raquel Fernández

Missing Women: Age and Disease

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Relative to developed countries and some parts of the developing world, most notably sub- Saharan Africa, there are far less women than men in India and China. It has been argued that as many as a hundred million women could be missing. The possibility of gender bias at birth and the mistreatment of young girls are widely regarded as key explanations. We provide a decomposition of these missing women by age and cause of death. While we do not dispute the existence of severe gender bias at young ages, our computations yield some striking new findings . . . 

Women's Rights and Development

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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.
Raquel Fernandez, NYU