Gender-Discriminatory Laws and Women’s Economic Agency

Do Gender Quotas Inuence Womens Representation and Policies?

This paper investigates the e¤ect of applying gender quotas on policy decisions. I …rst examine the e¤ect of gender quotas on the representation of female legislators, study the correlation between gender quotas and di¤erent types of government expenditures, and then use quotas as an instrument for the proportion of female legislators to investigate the e¤ect of female legislators on policy out...

The Supply of Gender Stereotypes and Discriminatory Beliefs

Universal laws and economic phenomena

Despite the idiosyncratic behavior of individuals, empirical regularities exist in social and economic systems. These regularities often arise from simple underlying mechanisms which, analogous to the natural sciences, can be expressed as universal principles or laws. In this essay, I discuss the similarities between economic and natural phenomena and argue that it is advantageous for economist...

Competition and Gender Prejudice: Are Discriminatory Employers Doomed to Fail?

According to Becker's (1957) famous theory on discrimination, entrepreneurs with a strong prejudice against female workers forgo profits by submitting to their tastes. In a competitive market their firms lack efficiency and are therefore forced to leave. We present new empirical evidence for this prediction by studying the survival of startup firms in a large longitudinal matched employer-emplo...

Gender-Discriminatory Premarital Investments, Fertility Preferences, and Breastfeeding in Egypt

We investigate whether Egyptian mothers display son preference in their breastfeeding behaviour, given the trade off between the protective effects of breastfeeding and its contraceptive properties. We also examine how intensity of exposure to gender-biased parental investments before childbirth affects maternal nursing behaviour, exploiting exogenous variation in mothers’ age at premarital gen...