Parents in several cultures `discipline' their daughters to inculcate the supposedly feminine virtues and improve their prospects in the marriage market. This process invariably involves imposing restrictions on their behavior, movement, and social relations. We formalize the idea that pre-marital confinement of women can be understood as an equilibrium outcome of a game of asymmetric informati...

We leverage non-linearities in Danish child support guidelines and rich administrative data to provide causal estimates of parental behavioral responses to child support obligations. We estimate that a 1, 000 DKK ($160) increase in a father’s obligation is associated with a 273 DKK ($45) increase in his payment. A higher obligation reduces father-child co-residence, pointing to substitution bet...

Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paper argues that norms on the appropriate pay for women compared to men explain these findings. We take citizens’ approval of an equal rights amendment to the Swiss constitution as a proxy for the norm that “women and men shall have the right to equal pay for work of equal value”. We find that the gender wage gap narrows by on...

This paper explains the narrowing of gender gaps in wages and market hours in recent decades by the growth of the service economy. We propose a model with three sectors: goods, services and home production. Women have a comparative advantage in the production of services in the market and at home. The growth of the services sector, in turn driven by structural transformation and marketization o...

Marriage, Partnership and Sexual Orientation: A Study of British University Academics and Administrators Using a unique data source on marital status, partnership and sexual orientation of academics and administrators at British universities, we estimate the impact of personal relationships upon earnings for men and women. While university data cover a relatively homogeneous group of workers, t...

Using an incentivized measure of individuals’ taste for competition, this paper investigates whether this taste explains subsequent gender differences in earnings and industry choice in a sample of highability MBA graduates. We find that “competitive” individuals earn 9% more than their less competitive counterparts do. Moreover, gender differences in taste for competition explain around 10% of...

We device a randomized experiment with task performance in which players directly decide as spectators/shareholders allocation criteria under ignorance or not of payoff distributions. Our main result is a strong and significant gender effect: women choose significantly more protection (that is, they choose criteria in which a part or all the total sum of money that must be allocated among parti...

This paper incorporates compassion into social preferences and tracks individuals’ choices over ten allocation decisions, categorizing participants’ behavior more precisely than previous work. Approximately two-thirds of participants exhibit consistent preferences in all ten exercises and other-regarding individuals are almost evenly split between inequity aversion and social surplus maximizati...

Employers around the world complain that youth lack the soft skills needed for success in the workplace. In response, a number of employment programs have begun to incorporate soft skills training, but to date there has been little evidence as to the effectiveness of such programs. This paper reports on a randomized experiment in Jordan in which female community college graduates were randomly ...

Using the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper investigates the determinants of training participation in Germany, distinguishing between self-initiated and employerinitiated training. Self-initiated training is considered as being a decision within households rather than purely individual. Therefore, in addition to standard training determinants, information on one’s own and partner’s time ...