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The Gains From Self-Ownership and the Expansion of Women's Rights
Abstract
At the time of the American Revolution under the common law doctrine of coverture, women were essentially the property of men, either their fathers' or husbands'. They could not vote, and with few exceptions, women could not own property, enter contract or join non-religious social and professional organizations. Nearly all of the restrictions on women common in 1776 no longer exist. We use a property rights model to explain this dramatic transformation in legal and social institutions. We characterize this as a shift from a regime in which men controlled women and owned their output to a regime in which women own themselves and their output and contract freely with others. In particular, the model shows how greater gains from human capital investment, as markets expand, increases the gains from self-ownership. Using unique data sets on state laws and legal history, we empirically examine several important changes in women's rights, across jurisdictions and over time, including the exceptional cases of women's rights under coverture and the adoption of the married women's property acts during the last half of the 19th century. Our evidence indicates that women's rights expand when the gains from human capital investment are high and are thus often associated with large, specialized markets. Using a panel of state data from 1850-1920, we find that states with a greater fraction of city dwellers, greater per capita wealth, and greater fraction of literate or schooled females were more likely to enact laws expanding women's rights.
... By 1920, all but four states had followed suit. Geddes and Lueck (2002) argue that it may not be fair to call the post-1920 era true coverture, as the 19 th Amendment (passed in 1920) granted women the right to vote. This may well have affected the de facto implementation of coverture. ...
... 7 Property laws were passed by state legislatures, generally narrowly interpreted by courts (Chused (1983), Zeigler (1996), and updated again. 8 We use the data on the timing of women's liberation by state from Geddes and Lueck (2002). 9 They code the year in which states first granted women rights over both their own property and their labor earnings, which we refer to as Geddes and Lueck "both" dates, or rights. ...
... Three questions arise regarding our choice to use Geddes and Lueck (2002) dates. The first issue is: Why use the dates in Geddes and Lueck (2002) as opposed to other, earlier, waves of laws? ...
In one of the greatest extensions of property rights in human history, common law countries began giving rights to married women in the 1850s. Before this “women's liberation,” the doctrine of coverture strongly incentivized parents of daughters to hold real estate, rather than financial assets such as money, stocks, or bonds. We exploit the staggered nature of coverture's demise across U.S. states to show that women's rights led to shifts in household portfolios, a positive shock to the supply of credit, and a reallocation of labor toward nonagriculture and capital‐intensive industries. Investor protection thus deepened financial markets, aiding industrialization.
... Much of the the U.S. literature focuses on property rights. For example, Geddes and Lueck (2002) looked at two statutory changes affecting women from 1850 to 1920: laws giving them control of their earnings and laws allowing them to manage estates separate from men. Using a property rights perspective, their analysis focuses on the incentives facing men to extend property rights to women. ...
... A handful of papers have followed up on Geddes and Lueck (2002). Doepke and Tertilt (2009) present a theoretical model where men would prefer that their wives have no property rights but that other women have property rights. ...
... In her model, lower fertility exacerbates the welfare levels between daughters and sons. Fernández (2014) finds, using data on the same period as Geddes and Lueck (2002), a negative correlation between fertility and reform. Finally, Lemke (2016) highlights how interjurisdictional competition between states for women was a contributing factor to the expansion of married women's property rights. ...
This paper seeks to understand the role played by immigrant ethnic composition in the process of women’s suffrage in the United States. Any theory of the extension of voting rights to women must explain why native men voted to extend the franchise to women. In this paper, we consider what we call the “ethnic group threat.” To the extent that native males believed that the political preferences of native women were better aligned with theirs than new (primarily male) immigrants, male voters would be willing to grant women voting rights to secure their social and political status. We use a hazard model and immigration data from 1870 to 1920 to investigate the impact of immigrant ethnic composition on women suffrage, we find that states with a higher proportion of immigrants from Italy, Eastern/Southern Europe, and Mexico gave women the the right to vote faster.
... The Married Women's Property Acts (MWPAs) varied in their content and tone, but usually addressed some combination of married women's rights to create enforceable wills, to engage in independent business activities, to refuse to pay their husbands' debts, to access their husband's estate after his death, or, as in the acts that are the focus of this paper, to keep wages independently earned and/or maintain separate property (Hoff 1991). I follow the convention established by Geddes and Lueck (2002) of considering women to have equality in property rights within marriage once past wealth and future earnings are legally protected through the passage of both a separate estate act and an earnings act. By this measure, 43 states reformed married women's property rights between 1855 and 1920 (Geddes and Tennyson 2012). ...
... This literature generally emphasizes changes in the marginal product of women's labor as particularly important determinants of property law. Geddes and Lueck (2002) argue that the MWPAs came about because the productivity gains from fully incorporating women into the formal economy became too significant to forgo. Fleck and Hanssen (2010) offer a similar account of rising marginal productivity of women's labor to explain the unusually strong state of women's rights in fourth century B.C. Sparta, where women were educated, politically influential, and owned approximately 40 % of land. ...
... Following Geddes and Lueck (2002), married women are considered to have attained full equality before the law once past wealth and future earnings are legally protected through the passage of both a separate estate act and an earnings act. 7 Separate estate acts codified and universalized the equity practice of marriage settlements by allowing all married women to own and manage property separately from their husbands. ...
Married women in the early nineteenth century United States were not permitted to own property, enter into contracts without their husband’s permission, or stand in court as independent persons. This severely limited married women’s ability to engage in formal business ventures, collect rents, administer estates, and manage bequests through wills. By the dawn of the twentieth century, legal reform in nearly every state had removed these restrictions by extending formal legal and economic rights to married women. Legal reform being by nature a public good with dispersed benefits, what forces impelled legislators to undertake the costs of action? In this paper, I argue that interjurisdictional competition between states and territories in the nineteenth century was instrumental in motivating these reforms. Two conditions are necessary for interjurisdictional competition to function: (1) law-makers must hold a vested interest in attracting population to their jurisdictions, and (2) residents must be able to actively choose between the products of different jurisdictions. Using evidence from the passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts, I find that legal reforms were adopted first and in the greatest strength in those regions in which there was active interjurisdictional competition.
... First, falsification tests show that the cultural impact of women's suffrage is rooted in the extension of democratic rights, not merely in the improvement of women's rights. We replicate the entire estimation using the different timings of women's property and earnings acts, which had profound effects on female status and related socioeconomic outcomes (Khan, 1996;Geddes & Lueck, 2002;Doepke & Tertilt, 2009;Fernández, 2014;Hazan et al., 2019). However, the results demonstrate that legal reforms in women's economic rights had no significant impact on individualism-collectivism, confirming the central role of democratic rights in the cultural shift. ...
... 17 Upon marriage, a husband was entitled to his wife's personal property and market earnings without restriction (Chused, 1982;Siegel, 1993). 18 Beginning in the 1840s, these patriarchal restrictions were gradually removed by women's property and earnings acts, which had profound impacts on broader social and economic outcomes (Khan, 1996;Geddes & Lueck, 2002;Doepke & Tertilt, 2009;Fernández, 2014;Hazan et al., 2019). This legislation serves to clarify the cultural channels of women's suffrage in two respects. ...
This study examines the relationship between two key factors in modern society: democracy and individualism. We hypothesize that extending democratic rights promotes individualism, which is supported by historical evidence from women’s suffrage in the US. Exploiting temporal variations in the passage of suffrage laws across states, border-county-pair analysis shows that the passage of women’s suffrage fostered individualism, as evidenced by an increase in the prevalence of uncommon names. This relationship was more pronounced in areas with higher proportions of adult white women, who were the primary beneficiaries of suffrage extension. Falsification tests confirm that the observed increase in individualism was rooted in the expansion of democratic rights, not merely in advancement of women’s rights.
... Theories on the expansion of women's rights have largely focused on economic rights in the United States. Geddes and Lueck (2002) relate the expansion of women's economic rights to women's role in the labor market, while Tertilt (2009) andFernández (2014) develop theories relating these same rights to women's role in educating children. A number of papers empirically analyze the consequences of the expansion of women's economic rights in the United States (Khan 1996;Geddes et al. 2012;Alshaikhmubarak et al. 2019;Hazan et al. 2019;Hazan et al. 2021). ...
... The income channel is central to the analysis of Geddes and Lueck (2002), who study the expansion of women's economic rights in the United States. They argue that, on the one hand, if women have no rights, husbands choose the time allocation of their wives but face an enforcement problem (the wife can shirk into leisure), which reduces women's labor supply and hence family income (the income channel). ...
... Why are some countries slower than others to reform gender-discriminatory laws? Many studies focus on structural variables, such as economic development (Doepke et al., 2012), technological change (Geddes and Lueck, 2002;Doepke and Tertilt, 2009), and cultural changes (Inglehart and Norris, 2003). These variables influence legal gender equality by affecting politicians and voters' incentives or attitudes. ...
... First, we include two economic variables that correlate with concerns for gender equality: a log of GDP per capita and a log of oil rents per capita, measured as a country's total rents from oil and gas divided by its population. We expect that the former will correlate with a higher demand for gender equality in the economic sphere (Geddes and Lueck, 2002;Fernández, 2014), while the latter will be negatively associated with it (Ross, 2008). Second, as the level of democracy is higher, women are better able to mobilize for legal gender equality and women's inclusion in office, and thus both the legal equality of economic opportunity for women and women's political representation may improve. ...
This article explores how women’s descriptive representation affects legal gender equality of economic opportunity. Building on existing studies on women’s descriptive and substantive representation, we argue that as the proportion of female legislators and ministers increases, legal gender equality of economic opportunity improves. Additionally, we expect that a country’s institutional context significantly shapes the influence of women in different positions of power on legal gender equality. The higher the legislature’s law-making power, the greater the effect of female legislators on legal gender equality; under the same condition, its relative influence compared to female cabinet ministers is also greater. Similarly, we hypothesize that the higher the level of democracy, the more effective female legislators compared to female ministers. To test these arguments, we draw on the database that provides cross-national information on legal discrimination against women in economic opportunities and provide supporting evidence for our arguments.
... The authors outline how the expansion of women's economic rights and political rights increases investments in human and physical capital and social welfare. On the other hand, technological change and economic development can drive reform, as discussed by Geddes and Lueck (2002) and Doepke and Tertilt (2009). According to the model of Geddes and Lueck (2002), when women have relatively few property rights, their provision of effort at work may be suboptimally low, which has a negative impact on household income; but the penalty associated with suboptimal effort on the part of female workers grows as their opportunities in the labor market increase. ...
... On the other hand, technological change and economic development can drive reform, as discussed by Geddes and Lueck (2002) and Doepke and Tertilt (2009). According to the model of Geddes and Lueck (2002), when women have relatively few property rights, their provision of effort at work may be suboptimally low, which has a negative impact on household income; but the penalty associated with suboptimal effort on the part of female workers grows as their opportunities in the labor market increase. Doepke and Tertilt (2009) present an alternative argument, in which men begin to favor more rights for women out of concerns for the welfare of their daughters and because women's rights are associated with increased investments in human capital. ...
This paper offers for the first time a global picture of gender discrimination by the law as it affects women's economic opportunity and charts the evolution of legal inequalities over five decades. Using the World Bank's newly constructed Women, Business and the Law database, we document large and persistent gender inequalities, especially with regard to pay and treatment of parenthood. We find positive correlations between more equal laws pertaining to women in the workforce and more equal labor market outcomes, such as higher female labor force participation and a smaller wage gap between men and women. (JEL D63, J16, J31, J71, J78, K31, K38)
... An alternative, yet complementary, approach emphasizes how coverture reduces married women's incentives to pursue economic opportunities, and hence, reduces household earnings and wealth (Geddes and Lueck 2002). The costs to households of these disincentives grow as the economy develops and women have more opportunities in the formal labor market. ...
... Eventually, these costs lead men to grant women property rights. An empirical examination of the timing of the enactment of married women's property laws across states finds that the early movers were states with larger urban populations, higher female school enrollment, and higher wealth per capita, results that are consistent with both models (Geddes and Lueck 2002). Women's economic opportunities and the returns to human capital would have been greater in urban than rural areas, and the higher rates of female school enrollment indicate increased investments in expectation of these returns. ...
The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 officially granted voting rights to women across the United States. However, many states extended full or partial suffrage to women before the federal amendment. In this paper, we discuss the history of women's enfranchisement using an economic lens. We examine the demand side, discussing the rise of the women's movement and its alliances with other social movements, and describe how suffragists put pressure on legislators. On the supply side, we draw from theoretical models of suffrage extension to explain why men shared the right to vote with women. Finally, we review empirical studies that attempt to distinguish between competing explanations. We find that no single theory can explain women's suffrage in the United States and note that while the Nineteenth Amendment extended the franchise to women, state-level barriers to voting limited the ability of black women to exercise that right until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
... There is a significant decrease in the gender wage gap (Blau, 1998;Edin and Richardson, 2002;Goldin, 2006;Mulligan and Rubinstein, 2008;Heathcote et al., 2010;Siegel, 2017). The legal rights of women have improved, including inheritance rights and divorce conditions (Geddes and Lueck, 2002;Doepke and Tertilt, 2009;Fernández, 2014). There is a positive trend in women's participation in the formal labour market (Fernandez, 2013) and in the number of women and their influence in political leadership positions (Alesina et al., 2013). ...
... Doepke and Tertilt (2009) show how women's rights increase with higher returns to education and a wife's exclusive ability to educate children. Geddes and Lueck (2002) exploit the relationship between women's rights and their incentives to invest in productive effort and human capital accumulation. They investigate the male's choice between two institutions: the patriarch regime, when only man's utility is maximized, and the equal rights regime. ...
We present an evolutionary growth model where the degree of gender equality evolves towards the value maximizing social output. It follows that a woman's bargaining power should depend positively on her relative productivity. When an economy is less developed, physical strength plays a key role in production and thus, total output is greater when the man gets a larger share. As society develops and accumulates physical capital and human capital, the woman becomes relatively more productive, which drives the output maximizing social norm towards gender equality. Empirical results support these predictions of the theoretical model. Simulations show that in the long run, an economy with gender equality can outperform an economy where gender balance of power maximizes social output, although in the short run, it can lag behind.
... 26 Teaching a child how to read and write may be easier than manipulating his or her reproductive ability. 27 The institutional set up might also reinforce this mechanism. For example, if private and public investment are complementary in the production of human capital, an increase in public spending in education could result in an even greater parental investment by wealthier parents and a stronger persistence in the market trait. ...
... See Mailath and Postlewaite, 2006, for a theoretical justification of the link between parental investment and the persistence of market and non-market traits.27 Modern studies have found that the intergenerational correlation in health, while positive, tends to be a fair bit smaller than the intergenerational correlation in income(Currie and Moretti, 2007). ...
This paper estimates intergenerational elasticities across three generations in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploring how maternal and paternal grandfathers predict the economic status of their grandsons and granddaughters. We document that the relationship between the income of grandparents and grandchildren differs by gender. The socio-economic status of grandsons is more strongly associated with the status of paternal grandfathers than maternal grandfathers. The status of maternal grandfathers is more strongly correlated with the status of granddaughters than grandsons, while the opposite is true for paternal grandfathers. We argue that the findings can be rationalized by a model of gender-specific intergenerational transmission of traits and imperfect assortative mating.
... Assessment of the effects of the laws is dependent on correctly specifying when an effective MWPA or EA was enacted-a task that is complicated by the fact that the statutes sometimes contained loopholes or left out certain types of property ownership (like the rent derived from property) from the ambit of women's rights. Because the legislative record is unclear, some early studies, such as Khan (1996) and Geddes and Lueck (2002), used their own dates of passage. This inconsistency was addressed by Geddes and Tennyson (2013), who developed a definitive set of dates of passage for both the property acts and EAs. ...
... Because these factors have been the major ones cited in the literature, we use pooled data from the 1870-1900 censuses and regress changes in the state-level divorce rate between 1870-80, 1880-90, and 1890-1900 on changes in the urbanization rate, share of the state's population that is foreign born, share of manufacturing workers in the population, and the schooling attendance rate. Based on previous literature and holding constant the other factors, the urbanization rate is expected to increase divorce rates; the increase in foreign population is expected to decrease divorce rates; the share of manufacturing workers is expected to increase divorce rates; and the schooling rate is expected to have increased divorce rates due to the increased returns to women's labor (and thus the labor market) provided by the increase in education (Geddes and Lueck 2002;Geddes et al. 2012). ...
We analyze the effects of the Married Women’s Property Acts and Earnings Acts (EAs) on divorce rates in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States. We find that the property acts increased divorce rates, which is consistent with the predicted outcome, in household extensive bargaining models, of an increase in the married woman’s relative bargaining power. We also find some evidence that the EAs had a positive effect on divorce rates, though it is not statistically significant after accounting for the possibility that divorce rates changed prior to the enactment of an EA. To support our causal argument, we control for regional trends in the divorce rate and account for the timing of the laws’ effects. We also assess alternative explanations for the rise in divorce rates during the late nineteenth century, including age structure, divorce law, urbanization, economic development, and foreign immigration, and we find that only age structure and urbanization positively affected divorce rates along with the property acts. Finally, we provide support for our argument from court cases in which the acts were used to defend a woman’s property rights against claims from her ex-husband.
... Economists have examined the fundamental forces driving U.S. states' abolition of coverture starting around the middle of the 1800s (e.g., Geddes and Lueck 2002, Doepke and Tertilt 2009, Fernandez 2010. Legal scholars have placed these developments in an international context by examining the significant changes in married women's rights and economic status occurring in many countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (e.g., Chused 1983, Hamilton 1999, Siegel 1994a, 1994b. ...
... We thus went back in time to determine if earlier acts than those obtained through the above steps were passed. The final dates we derive are similar, but not identical to, those from Hoff (1991), Khan (1996), and Geddes and Lueck (2002). ...
Under coverture in the United States, a married woman relinquished control of property and wages to her husband. Many U.S. states passed acts between 1850 and 1920 that expanded a married woman's right to her market earnings and to own separate property. The former were called married women's earnings acts (MWEAs) and the latter married women's property acts (MWPAs). Interest in the acts' effects is growing. Prior literature examined how the acts affected outcomes such as women's wealth-holding and educational attainment. The acts' impact on women's non-marital birth decisions remains unstudied, however. We postulate that the acts caused women to perceived greater benefits from having children within rather than outside of marriage. We thus expect passage of MWPAs and MWEAs to reduce the likelihood that single women are mothers of young children. We use probit regression to analyze individual data from the U.S. Census for the years 1860 to 1920. We find that the property acts reduced the likelihood that single women have young children. We also find that the " de-coverture " acts' effects were stronger for literate women, U.S.-born women, in states with higher female labor force participation, and in more rural states, consistent with our predictions.
... where λ ∈ [0, 1] parameterizes the extent to which females find that formal rights over their property are effective (Geddes and Lueck (2002), Doepke andTertilt (2009), Fernández (2010), and Geddes et al. (2010)), and for males we have ...
... We show that if, with development, bequests take the form of human capital (which is similarly used by parents to attract a desirable marriage market for their children), then increasing the returns to female human capital could lead to the disappearance of marriage payments altogether. These key predictions of the model are in accord with the historical record of dowry payments and concur with laws aimed at abolishing the practice of marriage payments to grooms in lieu of bequests to daughters.Recent research has focused on the positive correlation between development and the economic rights of women(Geddes and Lueck (2002),Doepke and Tertilt (2009),Fernández (2010),Doepke et al. (2012), and Duflo ...
In developing countries, the extent to which women possess property rights is shaped in large part by transfers received at
the time of marriage. Focusing on dowry, we develop a simple model of the marriage market with intrahousehold bargaining to
understand the incentives for brides’ parents to allocate the rights over the dowry between their daughter and her groom.
In doing so, we clarify and formalize the “dual role” of dowry—as a premortem bequest and as a market clearing price—identified
in the literature. We use the model to shed light on the intriguing observation that in contrast to other rights, women’s
rights over the dowry tend to deteriorate with development. We show how marriage payments are utilized even when they are
inefficient, and how the marriage market mitigates changes in other dimensions of women’s rights even to the point where women
are worse off following a strengthening of such rights. We also generate predictions for when marital transfers will disappear
and highlight the importance of female human capital for the welfare of women. JEL Codes: J12, J16, J18, D10.
... In this regard, some researchers have claimed that men's coverture reduces women's incentive to exercise economic opportunities, and therefore reduces family income and wealth. However, as the costs and damage of this discouragement increases, men are more inclined to release women from coverture strategies, such as by granting women property rights (Geddes & Lueck 2002;Moehling & Thomasson 2020). Unfortunately, this research does not support this approach. ...
In a novel contribution to the entrepreneurial, the Gender and Development (GAD) and the relational capital (RC) literatures, this study examines the possible role of spouses on the entrepreneurial gender gap through the family embeddedness model, which sees the family members as embedded in their social relationships and describes family systems through three interrelated characteristics (family transitions, family resources and family norms including attitudes, and values). Using a unique representative matched sample of 321 married couples, the results supports both the preselection and especially the socialization hypotheses by showing that married people have a significant association with their partners regarding their entrepreneurial tendency which also increases as marriage duration extends. Furthermore, while such similarity is associated with an increased probability for women to become an entrepreneur, it is also associated with men’s decreased probability to become an entrepreneur. Finally, clear evidence was found that family income had a significant positive association with men’s entrepreneurial tendency as well as with their probability to become entrepreneurs. However, it did not have any significant association with a woman’s entrepreneurial tendency nor with their probability to become entrepreneurs. The results shed light on important possible drivers for the entrepreneurial gender gap that works inside the family premises.
... Nevertheless, economics still largely ignores gender in international migration. This is although gender has become a central topic of study in almost all fields of applied economics (see, e.g., Alesina, Giuliano and Nunn, 2013;Beblo, Görges and Markowsky, 2020;Doepke, Tertilt and Voena, 2012;Duflo, 2012;Fernández, 2014;Geddes and Lueck, 2002;Olivetti and Petrongolo, 2016;Voigtländer and Voth, 2013). This paper studies a so far largely unexplored cause of the gender migration gap: the lack of women's rights and gender discrimination in countries of origin. ...
This is the first global study of how institutionally entrenched gender discrimination affects the gender migration gap (GMG) using data on 158 origin and 37 destination countries over the period 1961-2019. We estimate a gravity equation derived from a random utility maximization model of migration that accounts for migrants' gender. Instrumental variable estimates indicate that increasing gender equality in economic or political rights generally deepens the GMG, i.e., it reduces female emigration relative to that of men. In line with our theoretical model, this average effect is driven by higher-income countries. In contrast, increased gender equality in rights reduces the GMG in lower-income countries by facilitating female emigration.
... Nevertheless, economics still largely ignores gender in international migration. This is although gender has become a central topic of study in almost all fields of applied economics (see, e.g., Alesina, Giuliano and Nunn, 2013;Beblo, Görges and Markowsky, 2020;Doepke, Tertilt and Voena, 2012;Duflo, 2012;Fernández, 2014;Geddes and Lueck, 2002;Olivetti and Petrongolo, 2016;Voigtländer and Voth, 2013). This paper studies a so far largely unexplored cause of the gender migration gap: the lack of women's rights and gender discrimination in countries of origin. ...
This is the first global study of how institutionally entrenched gender discrimination affects the gender migration gap (GMG) using data on 158 origin and 37 destination countries over the period 1961-2019. We estimate a gravity equation derived from a random utility maximization model of migration that accounts for migrants' gender. Instrumental variable estimates indicate that increasing gender equality in economic or political rights generally deepens the GMG, i.e., it reduces female emigration relative to that of men. In line with our theoretical model, this average effect is driven by higher-income countries. In contrast, increased gender equality in rights reduces the GMG in lower-income countries by facilitating female emigration.
... A capital increase linked to economic growth elevates the comparative income for women in the model. Geddes and Lueck (2002) used a property-rights analysis to determine the relationship between women's rights and the impact on economic growth. Their model explained that in an equal rights marriage, both men and women can make a complete contribution within and outside their homes. ...
The purpose of this study is to identify the relationship between gender inequality and economic growth in developing countries. The study uses a panel of countries for the period 1960 to 2019, aggregated in 5-year intervals. The system generalised method of moments (system GMM) model and the panel autoregressive distributive lag model are used to evaluate the relationship between gender inequality in human capital and economic growth across developing countries. A gender inequality index was modelled using the disparities in human capital, with the inclusion of maternal mortality. The findings of this study suggest that gender inequality accounted for a significant variability in GDP per capita. The empirical results illustrate that the gender inequality negatively impacts economic growth and that the gender gap needs to be narrowed to achieve higher levels of economic growth for low-income countries. RIASSUNTO Disuguaglianze di genere e crescita economica nei paesi in via di sviluppo Il fine di questo articolo è identificare la relazione tra disuguaglianze di genere e crescita economica nei paesi in via di sviluppo. Viene utilizzato un panel di paesi nel periodo 1960-2019, in intervalli aggregati di 5 anni. I modelli utilizzati per valutare la relazione tra disuguaglianze di genere nel capitale umano e la crescita economica nei paesi in via di sviluppo sono il system GMM e il panel ARDL. È stato creato un indice di disuguaglianza di genere usando le disparità nel capitale umano, inclusa la mortalità materna. I risultati suggeriscono che le disuguaglianze di genere rappresentano una variabile significativa del PIL pro capite. Secondo i risultati empirici 2 N. Ngepah-C.S. Saba-C.L.M. Tinga www.iei1946.it © 2023. Camera di Commercio di Genova tali disuguaglianze hanno un impatto negativo sulla crescita ed è necessario diminuire il divario di genere per raggiungere livelli maggiori di crescita economica nei paesi a basso reddito.
... Perhaps the most common conceptual framework for understanding women's rights is the modernization hypothesis. This holds that the economic, social and political status of women reflects the overall level of economic development ( Fernández, 2014 ;Geddes and Lueck, 2002 ;Doepke and Tertilt, 2009 ;Doepke et al., 2012 ). Table 2 , column 2. ...
Individualism is associated with an emphasis on personal liberty and self-determination, values that reduce support for patriarchal norms and increase gender equality. Here, we investigate whether individualism affects women's economics rights, a key institutional determinant of the economic opportunities available to women. We provide evidence of an economically and statistically significant association between individualism and the de facto level of women's economic rights. This result is robust to a variety of controls, including per capita income, women's educational attainment, oil production, historical determinants of patriarchal culture, and the quality of legal and political institutions. In addition, we present evidence that this association is causal, drawing on instruments motivated by roles of climate and disease in cultural evolution. Finally, we show that individualism's influence on women's economic rights is magnified in democratic and common law countries, suggesting that democracies and common law systems channel cultural preferences into legal outcomes.
... By contrast, in industrial societies, there are increasing opportunities for women to join the labour force, and supplement the family income (Geddes and Lueck, 2002), even though this effect is stronger for later phases of industrialization rather than the early stages, due to the nature of early industrial jobs (Goldin, 1988). Similarly, the earlier phases of industrialization required lower levels of human capital, compared to the later phases in which specialization became more prevalent, allowing for the creation of different types of occupations. ...
Contemporary beliefs about gender equality differ across countries. Beliefs towards gender equality focus on the position and role of women in society, which include beliefs for women’s participation in the labor market, higher education, and politics. I explore how historical differences in land ownership affected gender equality beliefs. Historical land inequality has a negative effect on beliefs about gender equality. I also trace historical land inequality on the beliefs of second generation immigrants. The mother’s country of origin appears to drive the effect. This finding is consistent with similar findings from cultural transmission literature.
... Importantly, this framework is sufficiently tractable to allow for modeling institutional empowerment as a continuous variable, just like intrahousehold empowerment. 6 In contrast, Tertilt (2009), Bertocchi (2011) 5. Geddes and Lueck (2002) also make this point without a formal model. 6. ...
A large body of evidence suggests that women's empowerment, both within the household and in politics, benefits to children and has the potential to promote economic development. Nevertheless, the existing interactions between these two facets of empowerment have not been considered thus far. The aim of the present paper is to fill this gap by proposing a theoretical framework in which women's bargaining power within both the private sphere and the public sphere is endogenous. We show that the mutual interplay between the evolution of women's voice in the family and in society may lead to the emergence of multiple equilibria and path-dependency phenomena. We also discuss policy interventions that are the most suitable to promote women's empowerment when its multidimensional nature is taken into account.
... Sabarwal et al. (2011) survey the literature on women's (labor market) reactions to economic shocks and conclude that an increase in female labor force participation predominates, particularly in the less developed and newly industrialized countries typically sanctioned by the United States. Geddes and Lueck (2002) offer a very straightforward explanation for the extension of women's rights based on property rights theory (see also Lemke 2016). When women's labor market opportunities improve, husbands initially hold all legal power, but are unable to control the efforts exerted by women at work. ...
This study analyzes the consequences of economic sanctions for the target country’s human rights situation. We offer a political economy explanation for different types of human rights infringements or improvements in reaction to economic shocks caused by sanctions. Based on that explanation, we derive hypotheses linking sanctions to four types of human rights: economic rights, political and civil rights, basic human rights, and emancipatory rights. We use endogenous treatment regression models to test those hypotheses by estimating the causal average treatment effect of US economic sanctions on each type of human rights within a uniform empirical framework. Unlike previous studies, we find no support for adverse effects of sanctions on economic rights or basic human rights, once the endogenous selection of sanctioned countries is modelled. With respect to women’s rights, our findings even indicate a positive effect of sanctions that is associated with improvements in women’s economic rights. Only our results for political rights and civil liberties suggest significant deterioration under economic sanctions. We conclude that it is important to account for the potential endogeneity of economic sanctions and to distinguish different dimensions of human rights, as the effects of economic sanctions along those dimensions may vary considerably.
... Although we do not employ a principal-agent set-up, this result is similar to a classic moral hazard problem: because the wife receives only a fraction of her income, she has less incentive to work. As the fraction she receives increases, her incentive to work increases, as discussed (though not formally modeled) by Geddes and Lueck (2002). ...
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.
... Economists have examined the fundamental forces driving U.S. states' abolition of coverture, which started around the middle of the 1800s (e.g., Geddes & Lueck 2002;Doepke & Tertilt 2009;Fernandez 2010). Legal scholars have placed those developments in an international context by examining the significant changes in married women's rights and economic status occurring in many countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (e.g., Chused 1983;Hamilton 1999;Siegel 1994aSiegel , 1994b. ...
Under the common‐law system of coverture in the United States, a married woman relinquished control of property and wages to her husband. Many U.S. states passed acts between 1850 and 1920 that expanded a married woman's right to keep her market earnings and to own separate property. The former were called married women's earnings acts (MWEAs) and the latter married women's property acts (MWPAs). Scholarly interest in the acts’ effects is growing, with researchers examining how the acts affected outcomes such as women's wealth holding and educational attainment. The acts’ impact on women's nonmarital birth decisions remains unexamined, however. We postulate that the acts caused women to anticipate greater benefits from having children within rather than outside of marriage. We thus expect the passage of MWPAs and MWEAs to reduce the likelihood that single women become mothers of young children. We use probit regression to analyze individual data from the U.S. Census for the years 1860 to 1920. We find that the property acts in fact reduced the likelihood that single women have young children. We also find that the “de‐coverture” acts’ effects were stronger for literate women, for U.S.‐born women, in states with higher female labor‐force participation, and in more rural states, consistent with predictions.
... Adam Smith noted already a century before the historical events studied in this paper that economic specialization has effects on women's status (Dimand et al., 2004) and Alesina et al. (2013Alesina et al. ( , 2011 showed that technological innovations such as the agricultural plough changed and determined women's roles and gender attitudes for centuries to come. The expansion of women's economic rights has also been linked to economic growth (Geddes and Lueck, 2002;Jayachandran, 2015), although establishing causal pathways is generally considered hard since the two processes may be mutually reinforcing. In this paper, we explore whether natural resource-driven industrial specialization matters for gender roles, such as marriage markets and labor force participation. ...
Industrial development has ramifications for women’s participation in labor markets and society, in the short and long run. We explore the Gold Rush that took place in the Western United States in the second half of the 19th century. The Gold Rush led to high male-skewed inward migration and created gender-specific job market opportunities, with men entering mining employment and women entering the service sector. In gold mining counties, both men and women worked less in farming. After revealing the baseline patterns, we disentangle the direct effect of gold mining from the mediating effect of the skewed sex ratio, using formal mediation analysis. The skewed sex ratio is driving lower marriage rates for men, and higher female participation in the service sector. The results are consistent with surviving written accounts from the time, suggesting a high premium for traditionally female services. Using census data spanning almost a century, we show that these differences persisted long after the initial conditions of the Gold Rush had passed.
... Furthermore, Ge (2011), Kaufmann (2014, 2017) and Wiswall and Zafar (2016) show that subjective marriage expectations have an effect on the acquisition of education. Finally, this paper contributes to the expanding literature on how the expansion of women's rights promote female human capital accumulation (Goldin & Katz, 2000Geddes & Lueck, 2002;Lagerlöf, 2003;Goldin, 2006;Doepke & Tertilt, 2009;Duflo, 2012;Fernández, 2014). This rest of the paper is organized as follows. ...
This paper explores how marriage prospects affect female human capital investments. I exploit a South African legal reform to identify a positive shock in marital gains to human capital of black women. The reform provides married women with the full legal capacity to sign contracts and own property, whereas prior to the law they were considered legal minors. I find that treated women increase their education by 8-10 months and premarital use of the pill by sixteen percentage points. These results are consistent across various specifications where I compare black South African married women to non-black married women, to foreign black women of similar tribes in bordering regions and to other `black' control groups that exploit variation in marriage propensity. The findings show that these marital gains are generated through a shift in intra-household bargaining power rather than improving marriage match quality. (JEL: I26, J12, J16, J24, N37)
... 11 Baskerville (2008) forcefully advances this view. Setting out "to test the effects" of the MWPAs in Canada, Baskerville concludes that the 9. US economic history research on economic causes (rather than effects) of marital law reform corroborates the view that the MWPAs caused an expansion of women's wealth because they posit a chain of causation from expanded rights for married women to increased socioeconomic status of women Lueck 2002 andFernández 2014; see also Doepke and Tertilt 2009). 10. ...
Shammas (1994) documented the expansion of women's wealth holding across the nineteenth-century United States, explaining it as the result of the married women's property acts (MWPAs) passed in most of states starting circa 1840. We look at the timing of the expansion of women's wealth holding, drawing on archival and published evidence from probate records. Starting with Richmond, Virginia, and its agricultural hinterland, we consider a variety of places, urban and rural, in the South and North, to suggest a general view of the eastern United States. In rough outline, while colonial women were at most one-tenth of probated wealth holders, antebellum women were at least one-fifth. Levels of women's wealth holding increased even more. The substantial narrowing of the gender wealth gap cannot be attributed to the MWPAs that followed. Perhaps those acts will explain the further narrowing of the gender wealth gap in the later nineteenth century, but that narrowing might better be understood as a continuation of previous trends. Our results remind that some legal reforms can better be understood as reflections than causes of social change.
... Sabarwal et al. (2011) survey the literature on women's (labor market) reactions to economic shocks and conclude that an increase in female labor force participation predominates, particularly in the less developed and newly industrialized countries typically sanctioned by the United States. Geddes and Lueck (2002) offer a very straightforward explanation for the extension of women's rights based on property rights theory (see also Lemke 2016). When women's labor market opportunities improve, husbands initially hold all legal power, but are unable to control the efforts exerted by women at work. ...
We use endogenous treatment-regression models to estimate the causal average treatment effect of US economic sanctions on four types of human rights. In contrast to previous studies, we find no support for adverse effects of sanctions on economic rights, political and civil rights, and basic human rights. With respect to women’s rights, our findings even indicate a positive relationship. Emancipatory rights are, on average, strengthened when a country faces sanctions by the US. Our findings are robust when applying various changes to the empirical specification. Most importantly, this study provides strong evidence that the endogeneity of treatment assignment must be modelled when the consequences of sanctions are studied empirically.
... Endogenous Female Bargaining Power. We consider endogenous female empowerment in the sense that the bargaining power in the next period θ t+1 is determined by the relative income of men (see for example Attanasio and Lechene, 2002;Geddes and Lueck, 2002;Iyigun and Walsh, 2007;Rees and Riezman, 2012, who follow a similar approach). A convenient formulation of this idea is represented by the following function. ...
... A strand of literature explicitly modelled the process (Peters 1986) and argued the frictionless assumptions of Coasean bargaining were violated when the individual shocks were privately observed. The literature also provided a contracting reason (Rainer 2007) as well as the argument the violation of Coase could happen through the generation of transaction costs arising from hold-up associated with human capital investment (Geddes and Lueck 2002). ...
Legal structures of divorce settlements are important in how marital division of labour impacts on divorce. They affect not only divorce welfare but also within-marriage allocations. A central question in this context is whether or not intra-marital bargaining is Coasean, where Coasean bargains are characterised by the costless transfer of utility between spouses when property rights are well defined. In Coasean bargains divorces are efficient in the sense that they cannot occur when the joint surplus within marriage is larger than the sum of individual divorcees’ values outside marriage. This is because the spouse with the highest value can always compensate the spouse who wants to leave, and thus persuade her/him to stay. Under non-Coasean bargaining inefficient divorces can occur, due to the absence of costless side-payments. This paper offers a theoretical framework to identify Coasean and non-Coasean behaviour. Whilst an increase in the spouse’s wage always reduces (increases) non-Coasean labour supply (home production), it increases both labour supply and home production under Coasean bargains. Observing labour supply falls after a divorce will again indicate Coasean bargaining. The paper provides a possible explanation for why both males’ preferences for stereotypical work division and females’ preference for non-monetary work aspects persist.
... The mechanism is based on women's role in nurturing children. In contrast, Geddes and Lueck (2002) argue that the initial expansion of women's rights was related to women's role in the labor market. Given that the main phase of expanding women's economic rights was in the nineteenth century, a time when female labor force participation was low, we argue that a mechanism related to a women's role in the family is more plausible. ...
Much of macroeconomics is concerned with the allocation of physical capital, human capital, and labor over time and across people. The decisions on savings, education, and labor supply that generate these variables are made within families. Yet the family (and decision making in families) is typically ignored in macroeconomic models. In this chapter, we argue that family economics should be an integral part of macroeconomics and that accounting for the family leads to new answers to classic macro questions. Our discussion is organized around three themes. We start by focusing on short- and medium-run fluctuations and argue that changes in family structure in recent decades have important repercussions for the determination of aggregate labor supply and savings. Next, we turn to economic growth and describe how accounting for families is central for understanding differences between rich and poor countries and for the determinants of long-run development. We conclude with an analysis of the role of the family as a driver of political and institutional change.
... example Attanasio and Lechene, 2002;Geddes and Lueck, 2002;Iyigun and Walsh, 2007;Rees and Riezman, 2012, who follow a similar approach). A convenient formulation of this idea is represented by the following function: ...
We set up a unified growth model with intra-household bargaining of spouses. In line with the data for less developed countries, we assume that women desire to have no more children than men and to invest no less in education per child. We show analytically that women’s empowerment promotes the transition from a state of high fertility, low education, and sluggish economic growth towards a state of low fertility, high education, and fast economic growth if the child quantity–quality preferences of spouses differ substantially. In this case, targeted policies to empower women represent a promising development strategy.
... Endogenous Female Bargaining Power. We consider endogenous female empowerment in the sense that the bargaining power in the next period θ t+1 is determined by the relative income of men (see for example Attanasio and Lechene, 2002;Geddes and Lueck, 2002;Iyigun and Walsh, 2007;Rees and Riezman, 2012, who follow a similar approach). A convenient formulation of this idea is represented by the following function. ...
... C. The property rights channel Geddes and Lueck (2002) explain the expansion of women's rights associated with economic growth using a property-rights analysis. According to them, if men and women have equal rights, marriage is a share contract and both are able to contract fully inside and outside the marriage. ...
... g markets, and it is gradually declining since the last two decades. There are many factors such as the level of education, social status, household level characteristics, and labour market conditions that affects decision to participate in the labour market. Among them, I focus on the biased 1 The important studies are Cooter and Schaefer (2012), Geddes and Lueck (2004), La Porta et.al. (2004), Glaeser et.al. (2002), Acemoglu et.al. (2001), North (1990), Barro (1991) and De Sotto (1989). However, some recent studies have challenged this view by casting doubts on the positive relationship between property rights and economic development ( see Voigt and Gutmann (2013) for detailed discussion) inheritance property laws as an institutional factor that ...
In 2005, India witnessed a constitutional amendment to the Hindu Succession Act of 1956, giving daughters the equal inheritance rights as sons. However, fives states in India had earlier amended the same Act in favour of daughters. Using this exogenous variation created by legislation on inheritance property rights, I exploit a difference-in-difference estimation strategy to estimate the impact of reform on female education, labour force participation and their daughter’s educational attainment. The study find that women who were exposed to the reform experience increase in their average schooling years and average months of labour force participation. It is interesting to note that this positive effect is also observed for their daughter’s educational attainment. Results obtain from this study are consistent with complementary and equalising effects hypothesis.
Individualism is associated with an emphasis on personal liberty and self-determination, values that reduce support for patriarchal values and increase gender equality. Here, we investigate whether individualism affects women's economics rights, a key institutional determinant of the economic opportunities available to women. We provide evidence of an economically and statistically significant association between individualism and the de facto level of women's economic rights. This result is robust to controls for a variety of measures, including per capita income, women's educational attainment, oil production, historical determinants of patriarchal culture, and the quality of legal and political institutions. In addition, we present evidence that this association is causal, drawing on instruments motivated by roles of climate and disease in cultural evolution. Finally, we show that individualism's influence on women's economic rights is magnified in democratic and common law countries, suggesting that democracies and common law systems channel cultural preferences into legal outcomes. JEL Codes: D1, J16, J2, O5, Z1
Regional development is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. It represents an overall development of any region. The concept of regional development means the fullest development of any region according to its potentialities. The problem of regional disparities is not found in India only rather it is a global problem. However, in India, it is more common than in any other country. The present paper is an attempt to show the spatial pattern of regional development at block level of Faizabad district for the period of 2010-2011. Twenty two variables have been selected for analyzing the spatial variation of development of 11 blocks of the district. For this study, secondary data have been collected from the stastical bulletin and primary census abstract. Composite index of development and Z score have been used to calculate the agricultural development, infrastructural development, industrial development, socioeconomic development and finally the level of overall development. The analysis revealed that Amaniganj holds the first position while Rudauli attains the low level of development.
In recent years, acceptance and tolerance of homosexuality has become symbolic of Western liberal, social, and political progress. This has been noted in discussions on homonormativity, homonationalism, and homocolonialism. While some of these discussions have touched on the intersections between sexuality, race, gender, and class, this article argues that this relationship has been historically produced as a standard of civilization. It notes that the politics and governance of sexuality, and its intersections with race, gender, and class, have historical relevance in producing social and political exclusions. In building this argument, the article considers how the politics and governance of sexuality have maintained a “divided world,” from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, transforming from a hetero- to a homocolonial standard of civilization. It draws from a number of examples, from the nineteenth century to the contemporary period, using a diverse set of materials, including ethnographic research, fieldwork, and historical documents to explain temporal and geographic connections regarding the politics of sexuality.
In 1924, the W. Atlee Burpee & Company® announced a contest calling for letters responding to the prompt, “What Burpee’s Seeds Have Done for Me.” By the deadline, Burpee had received thousands of letters, many written by women. Significant elements of this early twentieth-century contest influenced women’s response. These elements—the historical context, the call for letters, and the act of gardening—converged in a kairotic fashion to form a rhetorical opportunity particularly accessible for women. The contest allowed women to apply familiar rhetorical acts in risky and self-promoting ways to validate their work and publicly identify as successful gardeners.
Applicable statutes give Nigerian courts discretion to achieve fairness in marital property readjustment. Ironically, the courts’ approach has often been to adjudicate on the basis of formal title, resulting in a general failure to make any readjustments. This article offers two alternative explanations for this judicial behaviour: absence of a specific statutory marriage-centred definition of matrimonial property; and the courts’ failure to appreciate the implicit matrimonial property regime revealed by a perspicacious interpretation of the statutes. These factors lead the courts to exercise a title-finding jurisdiction instead of an adjustive one. This conservative approach results in the courts exercising an exclusionary prescription of property. These flaws ignore the socio-cultural underpinnings and environment of marriage that support patriarchy in Africa and generally “disable” women in relation to property rights. Sample court cases support this thesis and underscore the need for a statutory definition of matrimonial property, with marriage as its denominator.
In this paper, we study the applicability of success in women’s football as an indicator for female empowerment. Since football was for a long time a male-dominated sport, women’s success in this sport may be a suitable empowerment measure. As a proxy variable for success, we employ the world ranking of women football teams. Applying Dijkstra’s requirements for indices (parsimony, data availability, ease of calculation and interpretation, intertemporal and international comparability), we conclude that the women’s football teams world rankings may meet these requirements better than the established composite gender equality indices. Moreover, the latter indices are highly and significantly correlated with the sport success measure used here.
In this paper, we examine a set of workers for whom age-based and gender-based discrimination has been widely alleged: motion picture actors. We document, measure, and consider possible explanations for age-specific gender gaps among Hollywood actors, using nearly a century’s worth of data on films and film roles. Consistent with reports in the popular press, we find a large and very persistent gender gap: Of the nearly half-million different roles played in more than 50,000 feature films between 1920 and 2011, two-thirds have gone to males, and the average male actor is consistently older (by six to ten years) than the average female actor. Yet the age-based gender differences that we observe cannot be explained by a simple model of discrimination—while there are fewer roles for middle-aged women than for middle-aged men, there are more roles for young women than for young men. The fact that these patterns have held steady through major changes in the film industry – and in society as a whole – suggests that correspondingly stable aspects of moviegoer preferences contribute to the age-specific nature of gender gaps.
In this book, Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps draws on a lifetime of thinking to make a sweeping new argument about what makes nations prosper--and why the sources of that prosperity are under threat today. Why did prosperity explode in some nations between the 1820s and 1960s, creating not just unprecedented material wealth but "flourishing"--meaningful work, self-expression, and personal growth for more people than ever before? Phelps makes the case that the wellspring of this flourishing was modern values such as the desire to create, explore, and meet challenges. These values fueled the grassroots dynamism that was necessary for widespread, indigenous innovation. Most innovation wasn't driven by a few isolated visionaries like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs; rather, it was driven by millions of people empowered to think of, develop, and market innumerable new products and processes, and improvements to existing ones. Mass flourishing--a combination of material well-being and the "good life" in a broader sense--was created by this mass innovation. Yet indigenous innovation and flourishing weakened decades ago. In America, evidence indicates that innovation and job satisfaction have decreased since the late 1960s, while postwar Europe has never recaptured its former dynamism. The reason, Phelps argues, is that the modern values underlying the modern economy are under threat by a resurgence of traditional, corporatist values that put the community and state over the individual. The ultimate fate of modern values is now the most pressing question for the West: will Western nations recommit themselves to modernity, grassroots dynamism, indigenous innovation, and widespread personal fulfillment, or will we go on with a narrowed innovation that limits flourishing to a few? A book of immense practical and intellectual importance, Mass Flourishing is essential reading for anyone who cares about the sources of prosperity and the future of the West.
Looking at women's power in the home, in the workplace, and in politics from a political economy perspective, Torben Iversen and Frances Rosenbluth demonstrate that equality is tied to demand for women's labor outside the home, which is a function of structural, political, and institutional conditions. They go on to explain several anomalies of modern gender politics: why women vote differently from men; why women are better represented in the workforce in the United States than in other countries but less well represented in politics; why men share more of the household work in some countries than in others; and why some countries have such low fertility rates. The first book to integrate the micro-level of families with the macro-level of national institutions, Women, Work, and Politics presents an original and groundbreaking approach to gender inequality. © 2010 by Torben Iversen and Frances Rosenbluth. All rights reserved.
Some people dwell alone, many in family-based households, and an adventuresome few in communes. The Household is the first book to systematically lay bare the internal dynamics of these and other home arrangements. Legal underpinnings, social considerations, and economic constraints all influence how household participants select their homemates and govern their interactions around the hearth. Robert Ellickson applies transaction cost economics, sociological theory, and legal analysis to explore issues such as the sharing of household output, the control of domestic misconduct, and the ownership of dwelling units. Drawing on a broad range of historical and statistical sources, Ellickson contrasts family-based households with the more complex arrangements in medieval English castles, Israeli kibbutzim, and contemporary cohousing communities. He shows that most individuals, when structuring their home relationships, pursue a strategy of consorting with intimates. This, he asserts, facilitates informal coordination and tends ultimately to enhance the quality of domestic interactions. He challenges utopian critics who seek to enlarge the scale of the household and legal advocates who urge household members to rely more on written contracts and lawsuits. Ellickson argues that these commentators fail to appreciate the great advantages in the home setting of informally associating with a handful of trusted intimates. The Household is a must-read for sociologists, economists, lawyers, and anyone interested in the fundamentals of domestic life.
We provide the first comprehensive documentation of enactment by U.S. states of two types of Acts removing married women's legal impediments in the economic sphere: the Married Women's Property Acts (MWPAs) and the Earnings Acts (EAs). We identify MWPAs that granted married women the right to own and control real and personal property, and Earnings Acts that granted married women the right to own and control their market earnings. Such Acts were passed by most states between 1850 and 1920, and were critical in weakening the patriarchal common-law doctrine of coverture. Scholars studying the Acts' causes and consequences have used different enactment dates. We describe a three-step method for determining accurate dates of passage, apply that method to the contiguous 48 states, uncover dates not listed in previous studies, and show how our dates differ from the present published lists. We also show how enactment varied across regions, and across states with different marital property regimes. We relate Act timing to social changes occurring at those times, such as women's suffrage group organizing and the passage of compulsory schooling laws. We hope that our investigation will inform future empirical study of these important legal changes. Capital
In this paper I develop a critique of both standard neoclassical and standard Marxian conceptualizations of human capital that illustrates an important hypothesis of feminist political economy: collective conflicts based on class, gender, and age, as well as other dimensions of collective identity, affect the distribution of the costs of developing human capital.
JEL codes: B50; E11; E24
The problems of existence, uniqueness and location of maximum likelihood estimates in log linear models have received special attention in the literature (Haberman, 1974, Chapter 2; Wedderburn, 1976; Silvapulle, 1981). For multinomial logistic regression models, we prove existence theorems by considering the possible patterns of data points, which fall into three mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories: complete separation, quasicomplete separation and overlap. Our results suggest general rules for identifying infinite parameter estimates in log linear models for frequency tables.
This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross-sectional time-series data for 1870–1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did. More married women did not vote for Dole because of a widespread sense of societal insecurity: ‘‘It is not that they distrust their husband, but they have seen
This paper develops a general, "collective" model of household labor supply in which agents are characterized by their own (possibly altruistic) preferences and household decisions are only assumed to be Pareto efficient. An alternative interpretation is that there are two stages in the internal decision process: agents first share nonlabor income, according to some given sharing rule; then each one optimally chooses his or her own labor supply and consumption. This setting is shown to generate testable restrictions on labor supplies. Moreover, the observation of labor-supply behavior is sufficient for recovering individual preferences and the sharing rule (up to a constant). Copyright 1992 by University of Chicago Press.
We examine the physical and mental health effects of providing care to an elderly mother on the adult child caregiver. We address the endogeneity of the selection in and out of caregiving using an instrumental variable approach, and carefully control for baseline health and work status of the adult child using fixed effects and Arellano-Bond estimation techniques. Continued caregiving over time increases depressive symptoms for married women and married men. In addition, the increase in depressive symptoms is persistent for married men. Depressive symptoms for single men and women are not affected by continued caregiving. There is a small protective effect on the likelihood (10%) of having any heart conditions among married women who continue caregiving. Robustness checks confirm that the increase in depressive symptoms and decrease in likelihood of heart conditions can be directly attributable to caregiving behavior, and not due to a direct effect of the death of the mother. The initial onset of caregiving, by contrast, has no immediate effects on physical or mental health for any subgroup of caregivers.
The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able, the grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period when I had formed any opinions at all on social or political matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress of reflection and the experience of life: That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes-the legal subordination of one sex to the other-is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.
Focusing on Petersburg, Virginia, Professor Lebsock is able to demonstrate and explain how the status of women could change for the better in an antifeminist environment. She weaves the experiences of individual women together with general social trends, to show, for example, how women's lives were changing in response to the economy and the institutions of property ownership and slavery. By looking at what the Petersburg women did and thought and comparing their behavior with that of men, Lebsock discovers that they placed high value on economic security, on the personal, on the religious, and on the interests of other women. In a society committed to materialism, male dominance, and the maintenance of slavery, their influence was subversive. They operated from an alternative value system, indeed a distinct female culture.
When the American feminist movement is discussed in legal circles, conversation often proceeds as if women first organized to seek equality during our lifetimes. But it was in the years before the Civil War that a "woman's rights' '2 movement first demanded equality at law. Those who do acknowledge the existence of this early woman's rights movement generally assume that its demands were satisfied long ago, with the reform of marital status law and the amendment of the Constitution to allow women to vote. Yet, as the remarks of Antoinette Brown Blackwell suggest, nineteenth-century feminists raised questions in their time that are still alive in our own.3 This Article examines a nineteenth-century feminist claim that legislatures refused to recognize and historians have since overlooked: the claim that wives were entitled to property rights in their household labor. In exploring the life and demise of this rights discourse, I offer a political history of housework at the dawn of the industrial era, and an account of the earliest feminist politics of women's work.
Carole Shammas is Professor of Women's Studies and History at the University of California-Riverside. She is the author of The Preindustrial Consumer in England and America and with Marylynn Salmon and Michel Dahlin, Inheritance in America, Colonial Times to the Present.
1. For the United States, see Joan Hoff, Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 127-135; for Great Britain, see Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women's Property Law in Nineteenth Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), and Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England 1850-1895 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and for Canada, see Constance B. Backhouse, "Married Women's Property Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada," Law and History Review 6, no. 2 (1988), 211-257.
2. See Anon., The Laws Respecting Women (London, 1777); Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); and Carole Shammas, Marylynn Salmon, and Michel Dahlin, Inheritance in America: From Colonial Times to the Present (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), Chapter 1.
3. The Roman law tradition allowed a married women to administer lineage properties not part of her dowry. In some areas of France, brides also had the option of retaining the right to administer their dowry property, if they wrote it into their marriage contracts. See Barbara Diefendorf, "Women and Property in Old Regime France: Theory and Practice in Dauphine and Paris," unpublished paper, 1990.
4. Maria L. Cioni, Women and Law in Elizabethan England with Particular Reference to the Court of Chancery (New York: Garland, 1985) discusses the emergence of equity jurisprudence in England. Shammas et al., Inheritance in America, 23-30, deals with the effects of the legislation. Susan Staves' Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), Chapters Two and Three, review the shrinkage of dower rights in England through judicial decisions and legislation.
5. Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America, Chapter Five.
6. Hoff, Law, Gender, and Injustice, 127-135, and Appendix One, and Richard H. Chused, "Married Women's Property Law: 1800-1850," Georgetown Law Journal 71 (June, 1983): 1359-1424.
7. Shammas et al., Inheritance in America, 83-88, 252-258.
8. The textbook with the reference to married women's property acts in the index is Mary Beth Norton et al., A People and a Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988). The other texts surveyed were Paul S. Boyer et al. The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1990); Winthrop D. Jordan et al. The United States: Conquering a Continent (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1987); Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy, The American Pageant (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1987); James West Davidson et al., Nation of Nations (New York: McGraw Hill, 1990); Robert Kelley, The Shaping of the American Past (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1990); James A. Henretta et al., America's History (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1987).
9. Mary Ritter Beard, Women as a Force in History (New York: Macmillan, 1946), v, 113-121, 155-169.
10. Salmon, Women and the Law of Property.
11. Richard H. Chused, "Married Women's Property and Inheritance by Widows in Massachusetts: A Study of Wills Probated Between 1800 and 1850," Berkeley Women's Law Journal 2 (Fall, 1986): 51.
12. Marylynn Salmon, "Republican Sentiment, Economic Change, and the Property Rights of Women in American Law," in Women in the Age of the American Revolution, eds. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 458.
13. Salmon, Women and the Law of Property, 88; Ibid., "Women and Property in South Carolina: The Evidence from Marriage Settlements, 1730 to 1830," William and Mary Quarterly 39, no. 4 (1982): 655-685; Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town 1784-1860 (New York: Norton, 1985), 54-86; Chused, "Married Women's Property Law: 1800-1850": 1379; and Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth Century...
This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross-sectional time-series data for 1870 to 1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did.
The existence of property rights affects the allocation and distribution of economic resources. The exclusive rights to ownership and control over assets leads to a different level and pattern of economic activity than would occur if these assets remained unowned or “common property.” While property rights are frequently subject to various constraints imposed by law or custom, within these bounds owners are free to use their resources to achieve their desired ends. Resources may be sold in an exchange of property rights, rented for a specified time period in exchange for some quid pro quo, or employed (or kept idle) by the owner himself. The owner's welfare function will include the income (or other utility) derived from use of the resource, while, for purposes of measuring national income, the final consumption of the entire population would be included.
In recent years, the political process has seemed to become increasingly favorable to issues involving women, as shown by the relatively large number of states which have passed the Equal Rights Amendment. The economic theory of politics would imply that this result would occur if the interests of women in removing labor force sex discrimination had increased. We argue that most sex descrimination in hiring and pay of women is in the form of statistical discrimination where sex is used as a proxy for labor force attachment. If this is so, then, on net, sex discrimination in employment practices would pay in the sense that the gainers from such behavior would gain more than the losers would lose. Married women would share in such gains since they would be compensated for their lower earnings by the higher earnings of their husbands. Single women, however, would receive no such compensation. We therefore hypothesize that the recent increase in legislation benefitting women is related to marriage rates, not to female labor force participation. Using votes in the state legislatures on the ERA as a measure of success by state of the women's movement, we find that our results do hold — number of single women is significant in explaining such voting but female labor force participation is not significant.
The familiar transaction-costs model is extended to allow for the varying costs and benefits of supervision and pain incentives on the one hand, and ordinary rewards on the other, in differentially effort- and care-intensive activities. Applied to unfree labor, this model accounts for the observed patterns of slave governance and manumission in extractive, industrial, agricultural, and service activities in antiquity and in the New World. Applied to free labor, it accounts for wage work on large estates in labor-surplus medieval England or modern Italy, the choice between bonuses and penalties in industrial contracts, and the growing paternalism of our own time.
Mary Ann Glendon offers a comparative and historical analysis of rapid and profound changes in the legal system beginning in the 1960s in England, France, West Germany, Sweden, and the United States, while bringing new and insightful interpretation and critical thought to bear on the explosion of legislation in the last decade. "Glendon is generally acknowledged to be the premier comparative law scholar in the area of family law. This volume, which offers an analytical survey of the changes in family law over the past twenty-five years, will burnish that reputation. Essential reading for anyone interested in evaluating the major changes that occurred in the law of the family. . . . [And] of serious interest to those in the social sciences as well."âJames B. Boskey, Law Books in Review "Poses important questions and supplies rich detail."âBarbara Bennett Woodhouse, Texas Law Review "An impressive scholarly documentation of the legal changes that comprise the development of a conjugally-centered family system."âDebra Friedman, Contemporary Sociology "She has painted a portrait of the family in which we recognize not only ourselves but also unremembered ideological forefathers. . . . It sends our thoughts out into unexpected adventures."âInga Markovits, Michigan Law Review
by Joel Prentiss Bishop. Volume 2 has imprint: Boston, Little, Brown, and Co.
by John Stuart Mill. Each essay first published separately: On liberty, in 1859; The subjection of women, in 1869.
by Theresa Schmid McMahon. Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1909. Bibliography: p. 125-131.
Photocopy. 29 cm. Thesis (Master of Laws)--University of Wisconsin. Bibliography: leaves 84-92.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1909. Bibliography: p. 125-131. Master microform held by: DLC. Microfilm.
A model is presented in which scale economies give market production a cost advantage over household production, but in which market production is limited by the extent of the market. The author views the production process as a series of stages, each further refining and specializing the product of the previous stage. As processing proceeds, the number of intermediate goods increases and markets thin out. Firms specialize in the early stages of production and households in the later stages. As an economy grows, production shifts out of households and into the market. Several other changes associated with economic development are also accounted for. Copyright 1990 by University of Chicago Press.
This paper examines the link between property rights and investment incentives. The author develops three theoretical arguments based on security of tenure, using land as collateral and obtaining gains from trade. The paper then presents empirical evidence from two regions in Ghana. The author investigates the possibility that rights are endogenous, with farmers making improvements to enhance their land rights. Finally, he suggests tests for which of the theories might explain the results. Copyright 1995 by University of Chicago Press.
It is widely agreed that the burden of housework in the industrialized West did not decrease as much as might be expected since 1880, and may have actually increased for long periods. The article proposes a new explanation: that increases in knowledge on the causes and transmission mechanisms of infectious diseases persuaded women that household members' health depended on the amount of housework carried out. The article traces the origin of this knowledge in the scientific developments of the nineteenth century and describes the mechanisms by which households were persuaded to allocate more time and resources to housework.
Using a data set of about 1,000 Japanese contracts, I study the relationships among urban labor markets, peasant employment contracts, and parental control over work-age children. From 1600 to the mid-18th century, the use of contracts for the sale, pledge, or long-term employment of children fell drastically. The reason apparently lies in the development of a large nonagricultural labor market. Because this market (with its informal, at-will contractual terms) made it profitable for so many children to abscond, it threatened any property right that parents may once have had in their children's work. And absent that property right, most employers no longer offered long-term contracts on attractive terms. By making it profitable for dissatisfied children to abscond, this new labor market also reduced the control that parents had over their children. Indirectly to be sure, it shaped relations within the family and constrained domestic exploitation as well. Copyright 1995 by Oxford University Press.
All husbands and wives share in the spoils of marriage. Sharing makes each partner a residual claimant and encourages spouses to provide marital inputs. However, because each spouse is only a partial residual claimant, each may be inclined to provide a "suboptimal" level of marital inputs. The choice of spouse influences the level of distortion and, under some circumstances, the efficient mating is between individuals of equal value. Copyright 1992 by Oxford University Press.
Based on recent theoretical developments I argue that the average level of human capital is a local public good. Cities with higher average levels of human capital should therefore have higher wages and higher land rents. After conditioning on the characteristics of individual workers and dwellings, this prediction is supported by data for Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs) in the United States, where the SMSA average levels of formal education and work experience are used as proxies for the average level of human capital. I evaluate the alternative explanations of omitted SMSA variables and self-selection. I conclude by computing an estimate of the effect of an additional year of average education on total factor productivity.
The standard economic model of the family is a 'common preference' model that assumes that a family maximizes a single utility function and implies that family behavior is independent of which individuals receive income or control resources. In recent years, this model has been challenged by game-theoretic models of marriage that do not impose 'pooling' and are, therefore, consistent with empirical evidence that income controlled by husbands and wives does have different effects on family behavior. In this paper, the authors review a number of simple bargaining models and relevant empirical evidence, and discuss their implications for distribution within marriage. Copyright 1996 by American Economic Association.
Introduction. One of the major debts that economists, legal scholars, and other social scientists owe Ronald Coase is that his work drew attention to the institutional structure of production. 1 Through the late 1970s at least, the dominant neoclassical paradigm in economics focused on the behavior of firms in different market settings under the assumption that the underlying institutions were well-defined and operational. If they were not, market-like forces would generate pressures for institutional change; in other words, the market continually disciplined institutions so that they could not stray far from what would be considered optimal. Hence, institutions, as such, were neglected, deemed undeserving of serious scholarly concern. The wide exposure of Coase's work; his winning of the Nobel prize in economics in 1991; Douglass North's similar award in 1993; and the provocative questions raised by other scholars, such as Oliver Williamson, Harold Demsetz, a
Sex and Reason (CambridgeIncentives and Norms in Law
- Posner
- Richard
Posner, Richard A. Sex and Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). . “Incentives and Norms in Law.” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 87 (May 1997):365-69
A Theory of Marriage: Part IIS11-S26. _______. A Treatise of the Family On the New Institutional Economics:Comment
- Becker
- Gary
Becker, Gary S. “A Theory of Marriage: Part II.” Journal of Political Economy 82 (1974):S11-S26. _______. A Treatise of the Family. 2nd Ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). . On the New Institutional Economics:Comment. in Contract Economics Lars Werin, Hans Wijkander eds. (Cambridge, Mass and Oxford: Blackwell, 1992):66-71