country specific preferences and employment rates in europe abstract european countries exhibit significant differences in employment rates of adult males differences in average labor leisure preferences determined by cultural values that vary across countries can be responsible for part of these differences however differences in labor market institutions productivity and skills of the labor force are also crucial factors and likely correlated with preferences in this paper we use variation among first and second generation european migrants to isolate the effect of culturally determined labor leisure preferences on individual employment rates if migrants maintain some of their country of origin labor leisure preferences as they move to different labor market conditions we can separate the impact of these culturally determined preferences from the effect of other factors we find that country specific labor leisure preferences explain about 24 of the top bottom variation in employment rates across european countries

unbalanced sex ratios in germany caused by world war ii and their effect on fertility a life cycle perspective this paper analyzes the effects of permanently unbalanced sex ratios in germany caused by world war ii on fertility outcomes over the life cycle using census records linked with individual biography data our analysis confirms the commonly found short term pattern of decreased fertility rates due to a stark imbalance of the sex ratio yet the long term effects of such an imbalance crucially depend on when in the life cycle fertility is evaluated we find that female cohorts with low sex ratios have fewer children at younger ages and a larger fraction remains childless while childlessness remains higher throughout their life cycle mothers from affected cohorts catch up and even overcompensate at later ages with respect to the number of children our preferred reading of this result is that with low sex ratios women select themselves into late motherhood according to their fertility preferences this interpretation is consistent with the finding that women from affected cohorts expand their childbearing period and accept lower quality matches in the marriage market our findings have important implications for understanding the long term consequences of large population shocks

gender inequality and economic development fertility education and norms we document the evolution of gender inequality in labour market outcomes earnings labour supply and wage rates over the path of economic development and present evidence on the potential reasons for this evolution to this end we have created a micro database that compiles 248 surveys from 53 countries between 1967 and 2014 covering a wide range of per capita income levels there is large convergence in the earnings of men and women over the path of development driven by female labour force participation and wage rates we argue that the single most important factor behind this convergence is demographic transition the effects of children on gender gaps child penalties are large at both low and high levels of development but fertility declines drastically over the growth process and thus reduces the aggregate implications of children we also document gender convergence in educational attainment and consider its effects on earnings inequality arguing that these are significant but less dramatic than the effects of fertility finally we document striking changes in the values or norms surrounding the role of women with children implying that such changes could serve as a reinforcing mechanism for gender convergence

the impact of social capital on economic attitudes and outcomes abstract this article traces the extant literature on the impact of social capital on economic attitudes and outcomes special attention is paid to clarify conceptual ambiguities measurement techniques channels of influence and identification strategies insights derived from the literature are then used to analyze the marketplace lending industry in china where the size of the peer to peer p2p lending market is larger than that of the rest of the world combined ironically approximately two thirds of these online p2p lending platforms have failed empirical evidence from the monthly operating data of 735 lending platforms and transaction level data from one prominent platform renrendai shows that platforms in provinces with high social capital have low risk of failure and borrowers in provinces with high social capital can borrow at low interest rate and are less likely to default we also provide observations to guide future economic research on social capital

do female gender role attitudes affect labour market participation in egypt abstractwe analyse the inter generational relationship of attitudes towards gender roles and their impact on individuals labour market participations in egypt we find a strong correlation between mothers and daughters perceptions of gender roles unlike the existing literature perceptions are not associated with the labour market status even if we control for endogeneity issues using an instrumental variable regression furthermore higher educated females are more likely to be unemployed in egypt these results imply that perceptions among females are not translated into their labour market behaviour and the supply side policies alone may not be sufficient for improving young women s employment opportunities

the gender gap fertility and growth changes in fertility have long been recognized as important correlates of economic growth with the relationship between the level of fertility and the level of income per capita being one of the strongest observable correlations in cross country data this paper examines the linkages between fertility and growth theory the structure of the model is presented in sections on production couples decision making system dynamics and steady state equilibria the first component of the model is that increases in capital per worker raise womens relative wages since capital is more complementary to womens labor input than to mens the second component is that increasing womens relative wages reduces fertility by raising the cost of children more than household income finally lower fertility raises the level of capital per worker a positive feedback loop generates demographic transition a rapid decline in fertility accompanied by accelerated output growth

the math gender gap the role of culture this paper investigates the effect of gender related culture on the math gender gap by analysing math test scores of second generation immigrants who are all exposed to a common set of host country laws and institutions we find that immigrant girls whose parents come from more gender equal countries perform better relative to similar boys than immigrant girls whose parents come from less gender equal countries suggesting an important role of cultural beliefs on the role of women in society on the math gender gap the transmission of cultural beliefs accounts for at least two thirds of the overall contribution of gender related factors

the caloric costs of culture evidence from indian migrants anthropologists have long documented substantial and persistent differences across social groups in the preferences and taboos for particular foods one natural question to ask is whether such food cultures matter in an economic sense in particular can culture constrain caloric intake and contribute to malnutrition to answer this question i first document that inter state migrants within india consume fewer calories per rupee of food expenditure compared to their non migrant neighbors even for households with very low caloric intake i then form a chain of evidence in support of an explanation based on culture that migrants make nutritionally suboptimal food choices due to cultural preferences for the traditional foods of their origin states first i focus on the preferences themselves and document that migrants bring their origin state food preferences with them when they migrate second i link together the findings on caloric intake and preferences by showing that the gap in caloric intake between locals and migrants is related to the suitability and intensity of the migrants origin state food preferences the most adversely affected migrants households in which both husband and wife migrated to a village where their origin state preferences are unsuited to the local price vector would consume 7 percent more calories if they possessed the same preferences as their neighbors

marriage stability taxation and aggregate labor supply in the u s vs europe americans work more than europeans using micro data from the united states and 17 european countries we document that women are typically the largest contributors to the cross country differences in work hours we also show that there is a negative relation between taxes and annual hours worked driven by men and a positive relation between divorce rates and annual hours worked driven by women in a calibrated life cycle model with heterogeneous agents marriage and divorce we find that the divorce and tax mechanisms together can explain 45 of the variation in labor supply between the united states and the european countries

evolution of gender differences in post secondary human capital investments college majors although women in the united states now complete more college degrees than men the distribution of college majors among college graduates remains unequal with women about two thirds as likely as men to major in business or science we develop and estimate a dynamic overlapping generations model of human capital investments and labor supply we allow for specific college major choices instead of aggregating these choices to the education level results show that changes in skill prices higher schooling costs and gender specific changes in home value were each important to the long term trends abstract from author

does gender inequality affect household green consumption behaviour in china abstract in this paper we examine whether gender inequality affects a household s decision to adopt green consumption behaviour in china building upon the literature that claims women tend to be more environmentally friendly than men we hypothesise that households in which women play a stronger role adopt greener consumption lifestyles based on a nationwide survey our empirical results show that households in counties with greater gender inequality use less energy efficient electric products and are less willing to save energy the results are robust to a number of variations in our empirical models social and economic factors are included to further explore the mechanisms underlying households decisions our findings provide new insights into green development from a micro level bottom up perspective they are relevant for policy makers because they indicate that promoting gender equality can have a favourable impact on green development

resource wealth and women s economic and political power in the u s states ross argues that oil wealth reduces women s economic and political power but critics maintain that accounting for a community s attitudes toward gender equality makes the gendered resource curse disappear this article disentangles the two perspectives by studying the effects of resource wealth on women s economic and political status in the u s states where resource wealth varies significantly while cultural differences are comparatively small data between 1997 and 2012 reveal evidence of a gendered resource curse consistent with ross i also update the theory of the gendered resource curse by showing via a culture augmented labor leisure model of workforce participation that far from being irrelevant when accounting for varying attitudes toward gender roles resource wealth and those patriarchal attitudes combine to suppress even more women s economic and political influence data from the u s states support this expectation as well

the long term effect of demographic shocks on the evolution of gender roles evidence from the transatlantic slave trade can demographic shocks affect the long run evolution of female labor force participation and gender norms this paper traces current variation in women s participation in the labor force within sub saharan africa to the emergence of a female biased sex ratio during the centuries of the transatlantic slave trade this historical shock affected the division of labor along gender lines in the remaining african population as women substituted for the missing men by taking up areas of work that were traditionally male tasks by exploiting variation in the degree to which different ethnic groups were affected by the transatlantic slave trade i show that women whose ancestors were more exposed to this shock are today more likely to be in the labor force have lower levels of fertility and are more likely to participate in household decisions the marriage market and the cultural transmission of internal norms across generations represent important mechanisms explaining this long run persistence

misperceived social norms women working outside the home in saudi arabia we show that the vast majority of young married men in saudi arabia privately support women working outside the home wwoh and substantially underestimate support by other similar men correcting these beliefs increases men s costly willingness to help their wives search for jobs months later wives of men whose beliefs were corrected are more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job outside the home in a recruitment experiment with a local company randomly informing women about actual support for wwoh leads them to switch from an at home temporary enumerator job to a higher paying outside the home version of the job

gender and culture this paper reviews the literature on gender and culture gender gaps in various outcomes competitiveness labor force participation and performance in mathematics amongst many others show remarkable differences across countries and tend to persist over time the economics literature initially explained these differences by looking at standard economic variables such as the level of development women s education the expansion of the service sector and discrimination more recent literature has argued that gender differences in a variety of outcomes could reflect underlying cultural values and beliefs this article reviews the literature on the relevance of culture in the determination of different forms of gender gap i examine how differences in historical situations could have been relevant in generating gender differences and the conditions under which gender norms tend to be stable or to change over time emphasizing the role of social learning finally i review the role of different forms of cultural transmission in shaping gender differences distinguishing between channels of vertical transmission the role of the family horizontal transmission the role of peers and oblique transmission the role of teachers or role models

distortions infrastructure and female labor supply in developing countries abstract in this paper i document cross country gaps between gross domestic product gdp per capita and gdp per worker the gaps are driven mostly by a lower female labor force participation lfp in developing countries females began to participate more in the labor markets of these countries when more households acquired access to basic infrastructure and when distortive policies affecting the prices of household appliances were partially removed i use a model of home production with endogenous labor force participation to account for these facts i find that the prices of household appliances and access to infrastructure are quantitatively important in explaining cross country labor supply differences

a theory of tolerance abstract we propose a theory of tolerance where endogenous lifestyles and exogenous traits are invested with symbolic value by people value systems chosen by parents for their children affect the esteem enjoyed by individuals in society intolerant individuals attach all symbolic value to a small number of attributes and are irrespectful of people with different ones tolerant people have diversified values and respect social alterity we study the formation of values attached to various types of attributes and identify circumstances under which tolerance spontaneously arises policy may affect the evolution of tolerance in distinctive ways and there may be efficiency as well as equity reasons to promote tolerance an empirical investigation of tolerance of homosexuality demonstrates that our theory helps to shed light on survey data of endorsed values

tough love and intergenerational altruism tough love and intergenerational altruism this article develops and studies a tough love model of intergenerational altruism we model tough love by modifying the barro becker standard altruism model in two ways first the child s discount factor is endogenously determined so lower childhood consumption leads to a higher discount factor later in life second the parent evaluates the child s lifetime utility with a constant high discount factor our model predicts that parental transfers will fall when the child s discount factor falls this is in contrast with the standard altruism model which predicts that parental transfers are independent of exogenous changes in the child s discount factor

intergenerational transmission of risk attitudes a revealed preference approach using data the german socio economic panel gsoep we investigate whether the willingness to take risks which is revealed via observed choices of occupation is transmitted from parents to children our approach resembles the one by dohmen et al 2008 who investigate the same question using stated preferences as risk variable we use earnings risk measured by the cross sectional coecient of residual variation obtained from mincerian wage regressions we nd that fathers riskiness of the job chosen is a signicant determinant of sons occupational risk our results are robust to dierent specications underpinning the hypothesis of intergenerational transmission of risk preferences

sixty years after the magic carpet ride the long run effect of the early childhood environment on social and economic outcomes this paper estimates the effect of the early childhood environment on a large array of social and economic outcomes lasting almost 60 years to do this we exploit variation in the living conditions experienced by yemenite children after being airlifted to israel in 1949 we find that children who were placed in a more modern environment i e with better sanitary and infrastructure conditions were more likely to obtain higher education marry at an older age have fewer children and work at age 55 they were also more likely to be assimilated into israeli society to be less religious and have more worldly tastes in music and food however these effects are found mainly for women and not for men we also find an effect on the next generation children who lived in a better environment grew up to have children with more education

equilibrium search with multiple attributes and the impact of equal opportunities for women this paper considers equilibrium two sided search with ex ante heterogeneous agents vectors of attributes and idiosyncratic match draws the analysis applies to a large class of models from the

gender role attitudes and the labour market outcomes of women across oecd countries this paper uses data from the world value surveys 1990 1995 1999 to investigate the impact of gender role attitudes and work values on women s labour market outcomes across 25 oecd countries anti egalitarian views are found to display the strongest negative association with female employment rates and the gender pay gap these views are however softening among recent cohorts on the other hand perceptions of women s role as homemakers which are likely formed in youth and linked to religious ideology are more persistent over time they could be implicated in the recent slowdown of the gender convergence in pay finally the unavoidable clash between family values and egalitarian views that takes the form of an inner conflict for many women the so called mother s guilt is another obstacle in the path towards greater gender equality in the labour market copyright 2005 oxford university press

occupational choice and the spirit of capitalism the british industrial revolution triggered a socioeconomic transformation whereby the landowning aristocracy was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classes as the economically dominant group we propose a theory of preference formation under financial market imperfections that can account for this pattern parents shape their children s preferences in response to economic incentives middle class families in occupations requiring effort skill and experience develop patience and a work ethic whereas upper class families relying on rental income cultivate a refined taste for leisure these class specific attitudes which are rooted in the nature of preindustrial professions become key determinants of success once industrialization transforms the economic landscape i introduction the industrial revolution was more than capital accumulation and growth it also set off a social and political transformation that redefined hierarchies in society and reshaped the distribution of income and wealth before the onset of industrialization in eighteenth century britain wealth and political power were associated with the possession of land over the course of the nineteenth century a new class of entrepreneurs and businessmen emerged as the economic elite for the most part the members of this class rose from humble beginnings and had their social origins in the urban middle classes the landed elite was left behind and eventually lost its political and economic predominance many observers of the time linked this reversal in economic fortunes to differences in values attitudes and ultimately preferences across social classes there are countless examples both in scholarly and in fictional writing of portrayals of members of the landowning class as averse to work unwilling to save ill disposed tocommercialactivity andunabletoconsidermoneyassomething

from mill town to board room the rise of women s paid labor the widespread participation of women in paid labor outside of the home and in the highest echelons of society would have been unheard of a century ago this paper documents this dramatic change in women s social and economic status and argues that it was determined both by contemporaneous demand factors and by the characteristics expectations and social norms regarding work and family of different cohorts of women history suggests that change in women s labor force experiences may be slow because it must await the entry of new cohorts of women and also of men into the labor market

productive efficiency in public and private firms abstract this paper compares the degree of x inefficiency which emerges as a consequence of the imposition of the optimal incentive contracts in public and private firms using a straightforward principal agent model with two possible states of the world it establishes the rather surprising result that in the good state of the world public ownership always results in a higher degree of productive efficiency

divorce risk wages and working wives a quantitative life cycle analysis of female labour force participation this article develops a quantitative life cycle model to study the increase in married women s labour force participation lfp we calibrate the model to match key life cycle statistics for the 1935 cohort and use it to assess the changed environment faced by the 1955 cohort we find that a higher divorce probability and changes in wage structure are each able to explain a large proportion of the lfp increase higher divorce risk increases lfp not because the latter contributes to higher marital assets or greater labour market experience however instead it is the result of conflicting spousal preferences towards the adjustment of marital consumption in the face of increased divorce risk the dramatic increase in the second half of the twentieth century in married women s labour force participation lfp has given rise to a large and growing literature that explores the roles of the multiple forces that led to this evolution some explanations have emphasised technological change in the household greenwood et al 2005 or in medical contraceptive technology goldin and katz 2002 albanesi and olivetti 2009a b knowles 2007 other explanations have emphasised changes in the wage

attitudes policies and work we study whether cultural attitudes towards gender the young and leisure are signi cant determinants of the evolution over time of the employment rates of women and of the young and of hours worked in oecd countries beyond controlling for a larger menu of policies institutions and structural characteristics of the economy than has been done so far our analysis improves upon existing studies of the role of culture for labor market outcomes by dealing explicitly with the endogeneity of attitudes policies and institutions and by allowing for the persistent nature of labor market outcomes when we do all this we nd that culture still matters for women employment rates and for hours worked however policies and other institutional or structural characteristics are also important attitudes towards youth independence however do not appear to be important in explaining the employment rate of the young in the case of women employment rates the policy variable that is signi cant along with attitudes is the oecd index of employment protection legislation for hours worked the policy variables that play a role along with attitudes are the tax wedge and unemployment bene ts the quantitative impact of these policy variables is such that changes in policies have at least the

the quiet revolution that transformed women s employment education and family the modern economic role of women emerged in four phases the first three were evolutionary the last was revolutionary phase i occurred from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s phase ii was from 1930 to 1950 phase iii extended from 1950 to the late 1970s and phase iv the quiet revolution began in the late 1970s and is still ongoing three aspects of women s choices distinguish the evolutionary from the revolutionary phases horizon identity and decision making the evolutionary phases are apparent in time series data on labor force participation the revolutionary phase is discernible using time series evidence on women s more predictable attachment to the workplace greater identity with career and better ability to make joint decisions with their spouses each of these series has a sharp break or inflection point signifying social and economic change these changes moreover coincide by birth cohort or period the relationship between the development of modern labor economics and the reality of women s changing economic role is explored the paper concludes by assessing whether the revolution has stalled or is being reversed women who graduated college in the early 1980s did not opt out but recent cohorts are too young to evaluate this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the intergenerational transmission of automobile brand preferences we document a strong correlation in the brand of automobile chosen by parents and their adult children using data from the panel study of income dynamics this correlation could represent transmission of brand preferences across generations or it could result from correlation in family characteristics that determine brand choice we present a variety of empirical specifications that lend support to the former interpretation and to a mechanism that relies at least in part on state dependence we then discuss implications of intergenerational brand preference transmission for automakers product line strategies and for the strategic pricing of vehicles to different age groups

how inheriting affects bequest plans we present and test the idea that bequest planning is linked with the experience of inheriting we consider a family tradition of bequeathing as a channel through which the intention to bequeath is moulded by and is positively correlated with the experience of inheriting using data from the survey on health ageing and retirement in europe share we find that the experience of inheriting enhances the intention to bequeath independently of the positive impact of wealth we also find that the expectation of inheriting has a positive impact on the intention to bequeath controlling for the expected increase in wealth on account of future inheritances

the market work behavior and wages of women 1975 94 changes in the labor market participation and wages of women in the united states are analyzed over the period 1975 1994 using data from the current population survey women are organized into nine birth cohorts five schooling groups and each year of age from 25 to 60 years and their weekly and annual work hours their annual work weeks their employment population ratio and their real average hourly earnings tabulated schooling differences in work behavior have become wider in recent cohorts as have their wages the relationship between work and wages is estimated for women of different ages cohorts and marital status the gap between the work of unmarried and married women has narrowed and the role of wages both the wages of women and those of husbands is examined to determine the extent to which changes in wages account for these movements excerpt

engines of liberation electricity was born at the dawn of the last century households were inundated with a flood of new consumer durables what was the impact of this consumer durable goods revolution it is argued here that the consumer goods revolution was conducive to liberating women from the home to analyse this hypothesis a beckerian model of household production is developed households must decide whether or not to adopt the new technologies and whether a married woman should work can such a model help to explain the rise in married female labour force participation that occurred in the last century yes the housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge she will give less attention to the home because the home will need less she will be rather a domestic engineer than a domestic labourer with the greatest of all handmaidens electricity at her service this and other mechanical forces will so revolutionize the woman s world that a large portion of the aggregate of woman s energy will be conserved for use in broader more constructive fields thomas alva edison as interviewed in good housekeeping magazine lv no 4 october 1912 p 436

gender economics an assessment concerns about gender equality have jumped to the forefront of public debate in recent years and gender economics is slowly affirming its place as a major field of study this assessment examines where we are in terms of gender equality it reviews the theoretical foundations that can explain existing inequalities and documents the empirical findings supported by the theories identifying avenues for future research and providing a fruitful framework to think about the effectiveness of policies and interventions targeting gender inequality in doing so i provide the foundations against which the contributions in this issue can be placed

endogenous preferences for parenting and macroeconomic outcomes abstract this paper investigates the effects of parenting time on macroeconomic outcomes and welfare when parenting choices are determined by own childhood experience and social norms in an overlapping generations framework parenting time and material expenditures on children generate children s human capital when the share of parenting time is relatively low and parenting and leisure are complements or weak substitutes the model has two steady state equilibria with different welfare levels in the high welfare equilibrium parents have stronger endogenous taste for parenting and spend more time with children and less in paid work higher productivity due to the higher human capital more than compensates for the reduction in working hours leading to a higher output level in comparison to the low welfare equilibrium

personal liberties religiosity and effort abstract in this paper we study the role of religiosity in influencing the choice of labor effort many religions promote restrictions on personal liberties such as divorce abortion gender parity or gay marriage often regulated by law we assume that the higher the degree of religiosity of an individual the less he enjoys such personal liberties and the less he likes to be in a society which allows them while seculars enjoy such liberties by standard consumer theory the differential valuation induced by religiosity influences individual decisions on other dimensions as well notably labour supply we show empirically that this nexus holds and that the size of the effect is large specifically we construct an index of personal liberties and find solid evidence in support of the joint effect of religiosity and liberties on labor effort our empirical results indicate that religiosity interacted with the legal level of liberties has a significant and strong negative effect on labor supply and that increases in the cap on liberties have a negative effect on the labor supply of the religious individuals and positive for the secular

assessing the engines of liberation home appliances and female labor force participation abstract the secular rise in female labor force participation highlighted in the recent macroeconomics literature on growth and structural change has been associated with the declining price and wider availability of home appliances this paper uses a new and unique country data set on the price of home appliances to test its impact on female labor supply we assess the role of the price of appliances in raising participation by comparing it to other structural determinants such as average male income a decrease in the relative price of appliances the ratio of the price of appliances to the consumer price index leads to a substantial and statistically significant increase in female labor force participation in the united kingdom for instance the decline in the relative price of home appliances alone accounts for about 10 to 15 of the increase in female labor force participation from 1975 to 1999 this result is robust to the inclusion of additional controls such as country dummies time trend go

women s career choices social norms and child care policies our model explains the observed gender specific patterns of career and child care choices through endogenous social norms we study how these norms interact with the gender wage gap we show that via the social norm a couple s child care and career choices impose an externality on other couples so that the laissez faire is inefficient we use our model to study the design and effectiveness of three commonly used policies we find that child care subsidies and women quotas can be effective tools to mitigate or eliminate the externality parental leave however may even intensify the externality and decrease welfare

measuring economic insecurity we provide a systematic treatment of the notion of economic insecurity assuming that an individual s sentiment of insecurity depends on the current wealth level and its variations experienced in the past we think of wealth as a comprehensive variable encompassing anything that may help in coping with adverse occurrences the current wealth level could also be interpreted as incorporating the individual s evaluation of future prospects variations in wealth experienced in the recent past are given higher weight than experiences that occurred in the more distant past two classes of measures are characterized with sets of plausible and intuitive axioms

on the origins of gender roles women and the plough the study examines the historical origins of existing cross cultural differences in beliefs and values regarding the appropriate role of women in society we test the hypothesis that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution of gender norms we find that consistent with existing hypotheses the descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture today have less equal gender norms measured using reported gender role attitudes and female participation in the workplace politics and entrepreneurial activities our results hold looking across countries across districts within countries and across ethnicities within districts to test for the importance of cultural persistence we examine the children of immigrants living in europe and the united states we find that even among these individuals all born and raised in the same country those with a heritage of traditional plough use exhibit less equal beliefs about gender roles today jel codes d03 j16 n30 copyright 2013 oxford university press

the intergenerational transmission of risk and trust attitudes recent theories endogenize the attitude endowments of individuals assuming that they are shaped by the attitudes of parents and other role models this paper tests empirically for the relevance of three aspects of the attitude transmission process highlighted in this theoretical literature 1 transmission of attitudes from parents to children 2 an impact of prevailing attitudes in the local environment on child attitudes and 3 positive assortative mating of parents which enhances the ability of a parent to pass on his or her attitudes to the child we focus on two fundamentally important attitudes willingness to take risks and willingness to trust others we find empirical support for all three aspects providing an empirical underpinning for the literature an investigation of underlying mechanisms shows that socialization is important in the transmission process various parental characteristics and aspects of family structure are found to strengthen the socialization process with implications for modeling the socialization production function and for policies focused on affecting children s non cognitive skills the paper also provides evidence that the transmission of risk and trust attitudes affects a wide variety of child outcomes implying a potentially large total effect on children s economic situation

women s liberation what s in it for men the nineteenth century witnessed dramatic improvements in the legal rights of married women given that these changes took place long before women gained the right to vote they amounted to a voluntary renouncement of power by men in this paper we investigate men s incentives for sharing power with women in our model women s legal rights set the marital bargaining power of husbands and wives we show that men face a tradeoff between the rights they want for their own wives namely none and the rights of other women in the economy men prefer other men s wives to have rights because men care about their own daughters and because an expansion of women s rights increases educational investments in children we show that men may agree to relinquish some of their power once technological change increases the importance of human capital we corroborate our argument with historical evidence on the expansion of women s rights in england and the united states

unequal laws and the disempowerment of women in the labor market evidence from firm level data institutions are defined as the set of rules that govern human interactions when these rules are discriminatory they may disempower segments of a population in the economic spheres of activity this study explores whether laws that discriminate against women influence their engagement in the economy the study adopts a holistic approach exploring an overall measure of unequal laws also known as legal gender disparities and relates it to several labor market outcomes for women using data for more than 60 000 firms across 104 economies the study finds that unequal laws not only discourage women s participation in the private sector workforce but also their likelihood to become top managers and owners of firms suggestive evidence indicates that access to finance and corruption are pathways by which legal gender disparities disempower women in the labor market

luther and suleyman this paper emphasizes that the evolution of religious institutions in europe was influenced by the expansionary threat posed by the ottoman empire between the mid 15th century and the early 17th century various historical accounts have suggested that the ottomans rise helped the protestant reform movement as well as its various offshoots such as zwinglianism anabaptism and calvinism survive their infancy and mature utilizing a comprehensive dataset on violent conflicts for the period between 1451 and 1650 i find strong empirical support for the idea that ottoman military engagements in continental europe lowered the number and extent of violent conflicts among and within the european states ottomans influence in europe extended to the feud between the protestant reformers and the catholic establishment during the time between the birth of lutheranism and the end of the thirty years war the likelihood and timing of military engagements between the protestant reformers and the counter reformation forces depended negatively and statistically significantly on ottomans military activities in europe

economics and identity this paper considers how identity a person s sense of self affects economic outcomes we incorporate the psychology and sociology of identity into an economic model of behavior in the utility function we propose identity is associated with different social categories and how people in these categories should behave we then construct a simple game theoretic model showing how identity can affect individual interactions the paper adapts these models to gender discrimination in the workplace the economics of poverty and social exclusion and the household division of labor in each case the inclusion of identity substantively changes conclusions of previous economic analysis

it s raining men hallelujah the long run consequences of male biased sex ratios we document the short and long run effects of male biased sex ratios we exploit a natural historical experiment where large numbers of male convicts and far fewer female convicts were sent to australia in the 18th and 19th centuries in areas with more male biased sex ratios women were historically more likely to get married and less likely to work outside the home in these areas today both men and women continue to have more conservative attitudes towards women working and women work fewer hours outside the home while these women enjoy more leisure they are also less likely to work in high ranking occupations we demonstrate that the consequences of uneven sex ratios on cultural attitudes labour supply decisions and occupational choices can persist in the long run well after sex ratios are back to the natural rate we document the roles of vertical cultural transmission and marriage homogamy in sustaining this cultural persistence

women prefer larger governments growth structural transformation and government size i introduction in developing and developed economies alike growth of income per capita is generally accompanied by a rise in the share of government expenditure in gross domestic product gdp as well as an increase in the participation of women in the labor force we argue that these phenomena are causally related propose a model that motivates that relation and provide evidence in its support the share of total government spending in gdp has increased by 10 in organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries in the last two decades alone see world bank 2001 and this rise comes in the wake of significant secular increases in government spending in the 20th century 1 apace with this rise in the government s share of gdp female labor force participation has also risen from 28 to 41 in the same countries and the same period 2 as for the long run goldin 1995 reports an increase in female labor force participation in the united states between 1900 and 1980 from 3 1 to 50 of the labor force 3 while according to tanzi and schuknecht 2000 the share of government spending rose in the same period from 8 to 30 figure 1 plots the change in government size as a share of gdp versus the change in female labor force participation from 1972 to 1999 for a sample of selected countries the twin increases in female labor force participation and government size are not a coincidence they are causally related the mechanism at work is twofold as wages rise with development and women choose to work more hours in the market they increase their demand for services that tend to be provided by the government including education healthcare care for the elderly and the unemployed the additional provision of government services further encourages female labor market participation as it decreases the time necessary to perform those home and family activities whose burden falls disproportionately on women 4 this circle of causation leads to higher female participation and larger governments our growth model extends galor and weil 1996 in addition to female participation in market activities fertility and output government size is also endogenously determined the rise in hourly wages that accompanies development and capital accumulation leads to an increase in female labor force participation as the opportunity cost of caring for the children increases in our model government spending decreases the time cost of performing household chores one obvious connection is the provision of extra school hours and child care which decrease the time cost of child rearing as couples women in particular participate more in market activities they choose higher government spending to compensate for time spent in the market under certain conditions which we make explicit they also choose higher tax rates with the result that female labor force participation and government size increase apace 5 as female labor force participation leads to a larger government the total cost of raising children is reduced for two reasons the total time at home decreases and the time cost per child also falls as public spending partly substitutes for home production of child care education and other activities 6 the decision to work outside the home is likely to lead women to demand wider and better provision of the public services that alleviate their unequal burden as caregiver at home in addition the role of women as insurer of family risks may lead to a demand for more government intervention as women become less present at home there is an additional mechanism through the composition of the public labor force government jobs in teaching and health which are a large portion of total public jobs tend to be filled mostly by women 7 our model draws on the solid literature on growth fertility and female labor force participation which is supported by microevidence

women s lifetime labor supply and labor market experience the pattern of joining the labor force only at an advanced stage of the life cycle was widespread among american women in the 1960s and 1970s but not since the 1980s to explain this change we conduct a theoretical analysis of the interrelation between women s lifetime labor supply choices and the dynamic macroeconomic environment in our model women choose the late entry pattern only at early stages of the growth process when wages are sufficiently low and grow sufficiently rapidly as the economy grows this lifetime labor profile vanishes and women either join the labor force either early in life or not at all

identity economics 2016 where do social distinctions and norms come from abstract identity economics provides a framework to analyze economic outcomes by establishing people s identities not just pecuniary incentives as primary motivations for choice the heart of the framework is social difference and norms this paper engages the emerging economic research into sources of divisions and norms individuals families schools governments and social movements the task at hand is to further to develop the micro foundations of identity in order to build a socially framed understandings of human motivation that will yield more robust accounts of behavior and institutions and yet better predictions of the implications of policy

the baby boom and world war ii a macroeconomic analysis we argue that one major cause of the u s postwar baby boom was the rise in female labor supply during world war ii we develop a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous fertility and female labor force participation decisions we use the model to assess the impact of the war on female labor supply and fertility in the decades following the war for the war generation of women the high demand for female labor brought about by mobilization leads to an increase in labor supply that persists after the war as a result younger women who reach adulthood in the 1950s face increased labor market competition which impels them to exit the labor market and start having children earlier the effect is amplified by the rise in taxes necessary to pay down wartime government debt in our calibrated model the war generates a substantial baby boom followed by a baby bust

accounting for the gender gap in college attainment i introduction one striking phenomenon in the u s labor market is the reversal of the gender gap in college attainment in 1980 57 of young men aged 25 34 compared with 46 of young women had some college education by age 34 by 1996 however female college attainment had reached 64 5 percentage points higher than that of the males in the same cohort in tact females overtook males in college attainment in 1987 and have led ever since a large body of empirical research emphasizes the role of the earnings premium as a key explanatory variable for the determination of education outcomes see e g becket 1967 mincer 1974 willis and rosen 1979 in addition an extensive literature shows that family background is an important determinant of the schooling decision see among others cameron and heckman 1998 2001 eckstein and wolpin 1999 ge 2008 kane 1994 recently several papers have argued empirically and theoretically that expected marriage is important in determining the schooling decision e g chiappori iyigun and weiss 2006 ge 2008 iyigun and walsh 2007 on the basis of this literature we construct a life cycle model that includes potential costs and benefits from the labor market and marriage market which determine individual college decisions in our model individuals with differing learning abilities first decide whether or not to enter college then they might get married and have children parents are altruistic and value their children s learning ability which increases with the parents education forward looking individuals take into account the impact of their own schooling on their children s learning ability other factors that affect an individual s decision on whether to pursue higher education include the expected direct labor market returns to college over one s lifetime the expected marriage market returns to college and the financial and effort costs of attending college these costs and benefits can differ by gender we calculate from panel study of income dynamics psid and current population survey cps parents education distributions the life cycle profiles of single marriage and divorce probabilities by education and the lifecycle profiles of earnings by education and marital status as exogenous inputs of the model we observe that the number of college educated parents increases over time in the marriage market a substantial increase of single probabilities and an increase of divorce probabilities has occurred for both genders regardless of college attainment status lifetime earnings by cohort are decreasing slowly for males of all marital statuses especially for married males lifetime earnings for married and divorced females are increasing gradually whereas those for single females are decreasing slightly to formally endogenize those changes is beyond the scope of our paper we instead focus on the mechanism in which under perfect foresight these changes affect education decisions we estimate the parameters of the model by matching data on college attainment by gender from the psid we present evidence on how well the model fits the data we then use the parameter estimates to simulate counterfactual experiments which break down the sources of changes in college attainment into the effects of changes in relative earnings changes in parental education and changes in the marriage market what accounts for the increase in college attainment over the past few decades we find that the increasing gap in earnings between college and high school graduates has important effects on the increase in college attainment for both genders when earnings are fixed at 1946 cohort levels attainment rates in 1996 drop by 15 5 and 14 2 percentage points for males and females respectively we also emphasize the importance of intergenerational persistence in schooling on the increase in college attainment for both genders

mothers and sons preference formation and female labor force dynamics this paper argues that the growing presence of a new type of man one brought up in a family in which the mother worked has been a significant factor in the increase in female labor force participation over time we present cross sectional evidence showing that the wives of men whose mothers worked are themselves significantly more likely to work we use variation in the importance of world war ii as a shock to women s labor force participation as proxied by variation in the male draft rate across u s states to provide evidence in support of the intergenerational consequences of our propagation mechanism

cultural constraints on innovation based growth to what extent does the cultural composition of a society impose a constraint on its long run growth potential we study this question in the context of an innovation based model of growth where cultural attitudes are endogenously transmitted from one generation to the next focusing on attitudes regarding patience we analyze the two way interaction between economic growth and the intergenerational transmission of patience exploiting this interaction we compare the long run growth performance of a culturally heterogeneous society where patience is initially underrepresented in the population with a culturally homogeneous society where all agents are perfectly patient our main result is that in the absence of any intrinsic preferences of patient parents to transmit their attitudes to their children the development paths of the two societies are bound to diverge with the culturally heterogeneous society experiencing lower growth rates yet if patient parents ceteris paribus prefer their children to be patient like them we show that the two societies can in the long run grow at the same rate jel d91 e24 o30 o40 z10

nature or nurture learning and the geography of female labor force participation one of the most dramatic economic transformations of the past century has been the entry of women into the labor force while many theories explain why this change took place we investigate the process of transition itself we argue that local information transmission generates changes in participation that are geographically heterogeneous locally correlated and smooth in the aggregate just like those observed in our data in our model women learn about the efiects of maternal employment on children by observing nearby employed women when few women participate in the labor force data is scarce and participation rises slowly as information accumulates in some regions the efiects of maternal employment become less uncertain and more women in that region participate learning accelerates labor force participation rises faster and regional participation rates diverge eventually information difiuses throughout the economy beliefs converge to the truth participation attens out and regions become more similar again to investigate the empirical relevance of our theory we use a new county level data set to compare our calibrated model to the time series and geographic patterns of participation

how much does sorting increase inequality some commentators argue that increased sorting into internally homogeneous neighborhoods schools and marriages is radically polarizing society calibration of a formal model however suggests that the steady state standard deviation of education would increase only 1 7 percent if the correlation between neighbors education doubled and would fall only 1 6 percent if educational sorting by neighborhood disappeared the steady state standard deviation of education would grow 1 percent if the correlation between spouses education increased from 0 6 to 0 8 in fact marital and neighborhood sorting have been stable or even decreasing historically sorting has somewhat more significant effects on intergenerational mobility than on inequality

gender identity and relative income within households band s income we argue that this pattern is best explained by gender identity norms which induce an aversion to a situation where the wife earns more than her husband we present evidence that this aversion also impacts marriage formation the wife s labor force participation the wife s income conditional on working marriage satisfaction likelihood of divorce and the division of home production within marriage markets when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man marriage rates decline in couples where the wife s potential income is likely to exceed the husband s the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work in couples where the wife earns more than the husband the wife spends more time on household chores moreover those couples are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce these patterns hold both cross sectionally and within couples over time

persistence in industrial policy impacts evidence from depression era mississippi this paper studies the effects of a large scale industrial policy implemented in 1930s mississippi on contemporaneous and modern day labor market outcomes attracted by unprecedented government incentives under mississippi s balance agriculture with industry bawi program 13 large manufacturing plants established operations in the state between 1936 and 1940 using difference in differences and synthetic control matching techniques i find that counties that received these plants experienced an over 15 increase in female labor force participation on average in the short run moreover these effects persisted decades into the future well after many of the original companies shut down i also find suggestive evidence of an increase in educational attainment among women in counties where bawi investment occurred the results highlight the potential for even transitory government interventions to have long lived effects on labor markets

work sharing and productivity evidence from firm level data this paper is the first to examine empirically how work sharing influences workers productivity using a unique data set from a large canadian firm this firm has adopted a work sharing scheme for one year which allows comparison of workers productivity with and without the work sharing programme it is found that work sharing has led to a significant decrease in labour productivity

shocking labor supply a reassessment of the role of world war ii on women s labor supply the most prominent feature of the female labor force across the past hundred years is its enormous growth but many believe that the increase was discontinuous our purpose is to identify the short and long run impacts of wwii on the labor supply of women who were currently married in 1950 and 1960 we use mobilization rates for various groups of men by age race fatherhood to see whether there was a wartime impact we find that an aggregate mobilization rate produces the largest and most robust impacts on both weeks worked and the labor force participation of married white non farm women the impact moreover was experienced primarily by women in the top half of the education distribution women who were married but without children during wwii were the group most impacted by the mobilization rate in 1950 although by 1960 wwii still influenced the labor supply decisions of them as well as those with children during wwii we end the paper with a resolution between the watershed and revisionist views of the role of wwii on female labor supply

gender inequality endogenous cultural norms and economic development this research focuses on the role played by cultural norms in the long run persistence of gender inequalities cultural norms about gender roles are considered to be endogenous and can generate gender inequality and low development traps indeed when the gender gap is internalized it leads to inegalitarian views about gender roles due to these inegalitarian beliefs boys receive more education and the initial gender gap is reinforced the existence of gender inequality traps is pointed out by the world bank as a major obstacle for economic development wdr 2006 the present article allows for a better understanding of the persistence of such traps and the means to escape

historic sex ratio imbalances predict female participation in the market for politicians we analyze the long term effects of gender imbalances on female labor force participation in particular in the market for politicians we exploit variation in sex ratios the number of men divided by the number of women in a region across germany induced by wwii in the 1990 elections women were more likely to run for office in constituencies that had relatively fewer men in 1946 we do not find a significant effect of the sex ratio on the likelihood of a woman winning the election these results suggest that while women were more likely to run for a seat in parliament in constituencies with lower historical sex ratios voters were not more inclined to vote for them voter demand effects thus do not appear to be as strong as candidate supply effects

the dynamics of continuous cultural traits in social networks abstract we consider an overlapping generations model where continuous cultural traits are transmitted from an adult generation to the children a weighted social network describes how children are influenced not only by their parents but also by other role models within the society parents can invest into the purposeful socialization of their children by strategically displaying a cultural trait which need not coincide with their true cultural trait we observe a cultural substitution effect when parents choose their behavior optimally based on nash equilibrium behavior we then study the dynamics of cultural traits throughout generations these converge if parent s influence on their children is large enough compared to the social environment s influence under convergent dynamics closed subgroups fully assimilate while heterogeneous traits prevail in the other groups speed of convergence is low when parents incentives to socialize their children to the own trait are high

sibling gender and wage differences abstractfamily influences on economic performance are investigated in particular sibship sex composition is related to hourly wages using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 the wages of men are increasing in the proportion of siblings who are brothers but the wages of women are insensitive to sibling gender nonwage outcomes are generally unaffected contrasts by age structure and demographic group are also presented the analysis addresses econometric challenges like the endogeneity of fertility and selection into the workforce in addition mechanisms such as labour market interactions human capital investment and role model effects are documented a questionnaire on job search indicates a same gender bias in the use of brothers and sisters in obtaining employment developmental and psychological assessments suggest that brothers may be associated with worse childhood home environments and more traditional family attitudes among women the findings are policy relevant and cont

instrumental cardinal concerns for social status in two sided matching with non transferable utility in this paper we apply the instrumental approach to social preferences in order to distinguish among various shapes of preferences for social status in particular we consider the shape of reduced preferences that emerge in the equilibrium of a twosided matching model with non transferable utility cole et al 1992 1995 show that under full observability of potential mates attributes instrumental concerns for social status are ordinal i e only one s own rank in the distribution of attributes matters we show that when we depart from full observability instrumental concerns for social status become cardinal i e also other features of the distribution of attributes matter we also show that the actual shape of cardinal concerns depends on how individuals can deal with the informational asymmetry alternatively leading to upward concerns i e making comparisons with higher rank people downward concerns i e making comparisons with lower rank people or bidirectional concerns i e being both upward and downward

time series growth in the female labor force in this paper we investigate the reasons for the growth in the female labor force in america during the twentieth century in our research we study the longer term trends since 1900 and conduct a more intensive examination of developments after the second world war on the basis of our work we conclude that rising real wages accounted for 60 of the total growth in the female labor force half of this wage effect in expanding labor supply was the fertility reducing consequence of a higher female wage

sorting and long run inequality many social commentators have raised concerns over the possibility that increased sorting in society may lead to greater inequality to investigate this we construct a dynamic model of intergenerational education acquisition fertility and marital sorting and parameterize the steady state to match several basic empirical endings we end that increased sorting will signiecantly increase income inequality four factors are important to our endings a negative correlation between fertility and education a decreasing marginal effect of parental education on children s years of education wages that are sensitive to the relative supply of skilled workers and borrowing constraints that affect educational attainment for some low income households

gender source country characteristics and labor market assimilation among immigrants abstract using 1980 2000 census data to study the impact of source country characteristics on married adult immigrants labor supply assimilation profiles we find that immigrant women from countries with high female labor supply persistently work more than those from low female supply countries while both groups of women work less than comparable natives on arrival women from high female participation countries eventually close the gap with natives entirely and women from low female labor supply countries eliminate most of it men s labor supply is unaffected by source country female participation suggesting that the findings on women reflect notions of gender roles

help or hindrance religion s impact on gender inequality in attitudes and outcomes summary this paper investigates the effect of religiosity on attitudes toward gender equality using world values survey data results indicate that religiosity is strongly correlated with gender inequitable attitudes across countries further ols tsls and 3sls regression estimates reveal that gender inequitable attitudes are associated with negative effects on seven measures of gender equality of well being and public policy no single religion stands out as more gender inequitable than others the impact of religiosity is likely transmitted via stealth effects on everyday behavior in economic transactions in labor markets household resource allocation and government spending

intrahousehold bargaining female autonomy and labor supply theory and evidence from india standard models of labor supply predict that unearned income decreases labor supply we propose an alternative noncooperative household model in which a woman s unearned income improves her autonomy within the household which raises her gains from working and can increase her labor supply we find empirical support for this model using women s exposure to the hindu succession act in india as a source of exogenous variation in their unearned income exposure to the hindu succession act increases a woman s labor supply by between 3 8 and 6 1 percentage points particularly into high paying jobs autonomy increased by 0 17 standard deviations suggesting that control of income is a potential channel for these effects thus policies that empower women can have an additional impact on the labor market which can further reinforce autonomy increases

brides for sale cross border marriages and female immigration every year a large number of women immigrate as brides from developing countries to developed countries in east asia this phenomenon virtually did not exist in the early 1990s but foreign brides currently comprise 4 to 35 percent of newlyweds in these developed asian countries this paper argues that two factors account for this rapid increase in bride importation the rapid growth of women s educational attainment and a cultural norm that leads to a low net surplus of marriage for educated women we provide empirical evidence supporting our theoretical model and its implications using datasets from japan korea singapore and taiwan

acting wife marriage market incentives and labor market investments do single women avoid career enhancing actions because these actions signal undesirable traits like ambition to the marriage market while married and unmarried female mba students perform similarly when their performance is unobserved by classmates on exams and problem sets unmarried women have lower participation grades in a field experiment single female students reported lower desired salaries and willingness to travel and work long hours on a real stakes placement questionnaire when they expected their classmates to see their preferences other groups responses were unaffected by peer observability a second experiment indicates the effects are driven by observability by single male peers

tough love and intergenerational altruism this chapter develops and studies a tough love model of intergenerational altruism we model tough love by modifying the barro becker standard altruism model in two ways first the child s discount factor is endogenously determined so lower childhood consumption leads to a higher discount factor later in life second the parent evaluates the child s lifetime utility with a constant high discount factor our model predicts that parental transfers will fall when the child s discount factor falls this is in contrast with the standard altruism model which predicts that parental transfers are independent of exogenous changes in the child s discount factor