Video: Nathan Nunn

Vast cross-societal differences in cultural attitudes about the appropriate

role of women
Depends on type of agriculture culture reflects on attitude on role of women
Plough agriculture: needs lots of upper body strength
o Men have relative advantage
Shifting cultivation: different strength from plough
o Hoe makes it suitable for both men and women
o Childcare and hoe is more compatible.
Boserups hypothesis
o Certain parts of world used plough agriculture
o Men had advantage for work in field
o Men tended to work in the field outside of the home, while women
worked within the home
o Belief that home was the normal or natural place for women
evolved
o Beliefs continue to persist today even after shift out of agriculture
Ethnographic controls
o Economic complexity
Index based on settlement density/complexity
o Political hierarchies
Number of levels of political authority beyond the local
community
o Domesticated animals
Presence of bovine or equine domesticated animals
o Tropical Climate
Proportion of the land within 200 kilometers of an ethnic
groups centroid that is tropical
o Agriculture suitability
Fraction of land within 200 km of an ethnic groups centroid
that is arable
Ones with plough agriculture has less women participation
Ancestors with plough, less equal attitude about gender
Outcome of interest
o Negative relationship of female labor and participation
Historical plough-use may not have only affected norms and beliefs, but also
institutions, markets and policies, which may also impact our outcomes of
interest
Immigrants face the same domestic institutions, markets and policies, but
have different cultural background.
If parents from plough history, daughters (children from 2nd generation
migrants) from that family will more likely have less participation in the
labor force.
Norms may persist even after migrating
If job is scarce, gender inequality grow

Increasing emphasis of important role played by culture, defined as values

and beliefs that aid in decision making
Cultural beliefs are slow moving and their evolution can be shaped by
historical forces

Sen, Voia, Woolley

Impacts of professors hotness on the quality of his or her teaching, as
evaluated by students, and the impact of hotness on research productivity
Hotness generates a significant earnings premium, even with comprehensive
controls for productivity
Strong relationship between hotness and teaching productivity.
Hotness as measurement for beauty and sexual attractiveness
Positive relationship between instructors attractiveness and teaching
evaluation using either independent measures of instructors beauty or
ratemyprofessors.com hotness data.
Better looking economists are more likely to be elected for executive
positions
Attractiveness increase teaching productivity more than it increases
research productivity.
Male professors who are rated as hot by their students ear more, female
professors do not
Results for men are primarily driven by mid-career and senior academics
The absence of a hotness premium suggests conditional upon being hired for
an academic position, appearance has a minimal impact on initial salaries.
For established male academics, we hypothesize that hotness may be
capturing masculine personality traits (ie. Assertiveness or confidence)
associated with both sexual attractiveness and ability to command higher
salaries
Both genders are more likely to be rate as high quality teachers if they are
hot, however effect for women comes primarily from the positive effect of
hotness on helpfulness, whereas hot men receive higher clarity scores.
Introducing more productivity controls, controlling for the endogeneity of
being rated, only increased the estimated returns to hotness.
Who receives an earnings premium: men
For established male academics, hotness clearly pays, while women may face
a conflict between being attractive and being financially well-rewarded
Hotness measures some combination of physical attractiveness and other
personality traits.
Wage gap article
Look presentation
Bailey

Rationale for funding the first domestic family planning programs in the
1960s was closely intertwined with the War on Poverty eras notion of
expanding economic opportunities for the poor.
Subsidizing contraception through family planning programs would promote
opportunities for disadvantaged women, who do not want more children
than do families with higher incomes but do not have the information of the
resources to plan their families effectively according to their own desires.
Programs would promote the opportunities of the next generation and thus
advance broader and longer-term economic prosperity.
less than fie dollars invested in population control is worth a hundred
dollars invested in economic growth
o dubious calculation?
o Easier to increase income per capita by reducing the denominator
than by increasing the numerator.
Family planning programs may influence national income directly over the
longer term
State repeals ban on contraceptive sales, increases in federal funding for
family planning programs are associated with large and persistent
improvements in the material living circumstances of the affected children as
adults.
Children conceived in areas with greater legal or financial access to family
planning went on to live in higher-earning households as adults than did
children conceived in the same areas whose mothers had less access to
family planning.
Both increasing legal access and increasing financial access to the Pill are
associated with a 2 or 3% increase in family income over all adults in the
affected cohorts.
Income gains reflects increases in childrens educational attainment
Children in smaller and higher-quality classes decrease chance of dropout.
Earnings gains reflect a tremendous increase in educational attainment.
An early life intervention generally supports their importance for human
capital and health investments early in life, but the mechanisms for these
effects remain largely elusive.
Mechanisms underlying the relationship between family planning and longrun outcomes remain unclear. Family planning programs do to provide
educational resources directly, nor do they teach parenting.
Family planning policies are similar as they increase parents economic
resources and time available per child, both of which may facilitate childrens
development and complement subsequent educational and health
investments in a dynamic manner.
Family planning may be much cheaper than many other interventions to
increase educational attainment.
Result suggest that family planning programs may provide a cost-effective
strategy for promoting opportunities and the longer-term prosperity
envisioned by their early proponents.

Adshade and Keay

Among manufacturing establishments, female employment and real wages
rose rapidly throughout this period, particularly within clerical occupation
Substantial incrases in the proportion of women in Ohios manufacturing
workforce, and womens wage increases kept pace with those of men
Parameters for industry group translog production function
Ohios manufacturers adopted new organizational structures and
technologies that favored an increasingly intensive use of female clerical
labor
Non-neutral technological and organizational changes over this period
explain the observed increases in the employment and remuneration of
female clerical workers
Increase in demand for clerical services lead to higher enrollment and
graduation rates from formal educational institutions, and the women
physical comparative advantage relative to men (less willing to forgo their
higher relative earning in manufacturing jobs), women filled a large and
growing proportion of the new clerical work force.
Few short years following the turn of the 20th century, industrial firms
substantially increased their demand for clerical workers to meet their
increased needs for administration in manufacturing.
Between 1900 and 1940, almost all of the worlds major industrial nations
were experiencing an increase in female participation in waged employment;
technological changes in home production durable goods, office equipment,
and manufacturing processes; changes in industrial structure; and changes in
the organizational structure of individual firms.
Manufacturing sector at the turn of the 20th century may be considered an
excellent case study for the investigation of the impact of rapid technological
and organizational change on literate and numerate female labor.
Between 1914 and 1937, number of women engaged in waged employment
increased rapidly, with the most dramatic increases in womens employment
shares concentrated in clerical occupations and in BIC industries.
Womens real wages rose rapidly during the first four decades of the
twentieth century, and the gender wage gap and the clerical relative to
production labor wage gap were approximately the same in 1937 as they had
been in 1914.
Increasing demand for female labor, particularly female clerks, was founded
at least in part on technological change, which was biased towards the
increasingly intensive use of female clerical workers
Tech changes that favored the use of literate and numerate women were
concentrated in the administrative and information-processing aspects as
manufacturing that were becoming increasingly large and complex form an
organizational perspective.
Without demand shifts, female relative to male average weekly wages would
have fallen substantially

In response to the transformative effects of the second industrial revolution,

there was a substantial demand response that accompanied the movement of
women into the waged workforce during the first forty years of the 20th
century.
Demand response that pulled women into manufacturing employment.
Tech and organizational changes must have driven much of the increase in
demand for educated female workers during this era.

Donohue and Levitt

Legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reduction.
In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization
fall relative to low abortion states.
Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50% of the recent drop
in crime.
Teenagers, unmarried women, and poor women are most likely to deem a
pregnancy to be either mistimes or unwanted, and that a large proportion of
these unintended pregnancies will be terminated through abortion.
Causal and adverse effect of early childbearing on the health and social and
economic well-being of children; this effect is over and above the important
effects of background disadvantages.
Unintended pregnancies are associated with poorer prenatal care, greater
smoking and drinking during pregnancy, and lower birthweights.
Life chances of children that are born only because their mothers could not
have an abortion are considerably dampened relative to babies that were
wanted at the time of conception.
Drops in the proportion of unwanted births during the 1970s and early
1980s appears to be the result of increasing availability and resort to
abortion.
Result suggest that an increase of 100 abortions per 1,000 live births reduces
a cohorts crime by roughly ten percent.
Crime was almost 20-25% lower in 1997 than it would have been absent
legalized abortion.
Social benefit to reduce crime as a result of abortion may be on the order of
$30 billion dollars annually.
Results suggest that all else equal, legalized abortion will account for
persistent declines of 1% a year in crime over the next two decades
Equivalent reductions in crime could in principle be obtained through
alternatives for abortion, such as more effective birth control, or providing
better environments for those children at greatest risk for future crime.
Cowan
Analyze effect of college costs on teenagers engagement in risky behavior
before they are old enough to attend college.

Individuals with brighter prospects for future schooling attainment may

engage in less drug and alcohol use and risky sexual activity because they
have more to lose if such behaviors have harmful effects in their lives.
Lower college costs in teenagers state of residence raise their subjective
expectations regarding college attendance and deter teenage substance use
and sexual partnership.
Correlation between schooling and health habits emerges in adolescence
because teenagers with brighter college prospects curb their risky behavior
in accordance with their expectations.
Policies that improve teenagers educational prospects may be effective tools
for reducing youthful involvement in such behavior.
Causal effects of college costs on teenage behavior is that tuition is only
correlated with behavior through its effect on teens college prospects.
Youths subjective short-term college expectations, like their eventual college
outcomes, are negatively affected by community college tuition rates.
Community-college tuition does not affect all teens equally, but rather has
the largest effect on youths who are plausible closest to the college
enrollment margin, casts doubt on whether the results can be explained by
some unobserved factor that varies at the state level and is correlated with
tuition.
Teenagers who will eventually complete more schooling engage in better
health practices.
Optimal response to differences in their college expectations rather than
differences in their time preferences or some other third factor
Anticipated schooling has an effect on behavior above and beyond any effect
that realized schooling has on behavior.
cost-effectiveness of policies is likely to depend on the degree to which they
target youths near the college-decision margin.

Kearney and Levine

Low SES (socioeconomic status) women are more likely to give birth at a
young age and outside of marriage when they live in more unequal places, all
else held constant. Results suggest that inequality itself, as opposed to other
correlated geographic factors, drives this relationship.
Role of economic marginalization and hopelessness into a parsimonious
framework that captures the concept of despair with an individuals
perception of economic success.
Empirical results are consistent with the idea that income inequality
heightens a sense of economic despair among thos at the bottom of the
distribution.
Women who grew up in low ses households are substantially more likely to
have an early birth (outside marriage in us) when income is more unequally
districuted in their location.
As the level inequality increase, low ses women are less likely to abort their
pregnancies.

Data do not support alternative explanations:

o Aggregate level variables that might affect an individuals perception
of economic sucess
Absolute level of income at the bottom of the distribution
College-high school wage premium
o Aggregate level that might be spuriously correlated with inequality
and teen birth rates and thereby confound the interpretation of our
primary results
Political leanings
Religiosity of a place
When a poor young woman perceives that ses is unachievable to her, she is
more likely to embrace motherhood in her current position.
When there is relatively more hope of economic advancement, it is relatively
more desirable to delay motherhood and invest in human or social capital
Income inequality heightens any perceived sense of economic despair., and
so this decision becomes even more common among poor women in more
unequal places.
An important factor in generating high rates of early, non-marital
childbearing in US and in some states with the US is young womens
perceived lack of economic opportunity.
Careful thinking that the result explains the decision-making process of all
individuals.
Have not investigated the precise channels through which inequality might
lead to a greater sense of economic despair among adolescents.
Role of relative, instead of absolute deprivation, in leading to acts of social
unrest.
People are less happy when they live around people who are richer than
themselves.
Relative income matters for the marriage decision of low-income men,
Greater level of income inequality are associated with increased levels of
residential and institutional segregation, individuals at the bottom of the
income distribution will be more likely to feel a heightened sense of social
marginalization, and hence economic despair.
Income inequality is associated with higher rates of early, non-marital
childbearing among economically disadvantaged women.
Inequality itself is primary driver of the relationship above.
Income inequality leads to a heightened sense of economic despair among
the poor, it will lead to higher rates of early, non-marital childbearing among
those at the bottom of the distribution.
High-inequality states and countries see higher rates of a host of drop out
behaviors, including lower educational attainment and higher rates of crime.