Three Essays on Gender and Cultural Economics

Three Essays on Gender and Cultural Economics PDF Author: Jordan Loper
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This thesis explores the long term effects of ancestral norms on contemporaneous outcomes, in the context of developing countries, with a specific focus on gender related outcomes. The 1st chapter explores the long-term effect of matrilineality on contemporaneous female HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa. I find that females originating from ancestrally matrilineal ethnic groups are today more likely to be infected by HIV. Matrilineal females' riskier sexual and contraceptive behaviours constitute the main explanatory mechanisms. The 2nd chapter explores how cultural norms and development policies interact in shaping women's empowerment and well-being in developing countries. My co-authors and I examine this question in the context of legal reforms and their differentiated impact on divorce and empowerment across traditional modes of post-marital cohabitation. We find that matrilocal women divorce more than patrilocal women following the reform and, when in stable marriages, experience a significant improvement in well-being and empowerment. The 3rd chapter examines the link between thedistribution of power in marriage and the decision to split-migrate (one spouse migrates alone) in Indonesia. Building on the second chapter, we find that the propensity of matrilocal husbands to split-migrate, relative to patrilocal husbands, increases by 41-76%, following the reform. We suggest that empowered women may have ex-ante gained control over outcomes that are costlier to monitor for husbands when they migrate. Hence, empowerment restores some efficiency in migration decisions by reducing the anticipated information asymmetry and the moral hazard associated with migration.

Three Essays on Gender and Cultural Economics

Three Essays on Gender and Cultural Economics PDF Author: Jordan Loper
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This thesis explores the long term effects of ancestral norms on contemporaneous outcomes, in the context of developing countries, with a specific focus on gender related outcomes. The 1st chapter explores the long-term effect of matrilineality on contemporaneous female HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa. I find that females originating from ancestrally matrilineal ethnic groups are today more likely to be infected by HIV. Matrilineal females' riskier sexual and contraceptive behaviours constitute the main explanatory mechanisms. The 2nd chapter explores how cultural norms and development policies interact in shaping women's empowerment and well-being in developing countries. My co-authors and I examine this question in the context of legal reforms and their differentiated impact on divorce and empowerment across traditional modes of post-marital cohabitation. We find that matrilocal women divorce more than patrilocal women following the reform and, when in stable marriages, experience a significant improvement in well-being and empowerment. The 3rd chapter examines the link between thedistribution of power in marriage and the decision to split-migrate (one spouse migrates alone) in Indonesia. Building on the second chapter, we find that the propensity of matrilocal husbands to split-migrate, relative to patrilocal husbands, increases by 41-76%, following the reform. We suggest that empowered women may have ex-ante gained control over outcomes that are costlier to monitor for husbands when they migrate. Hence, empowerment restores some efficiency in migration decisions by reducing the anticipated information asymmetry and the moral hazard associated with migration.

Three Essays in the Economics of Gender and Development

Three Essays in the Economics of Gender and Development PDF Author: David Aimé Zoundi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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Book Description
This Ph.D. thesis explores barriers to gender equality in developing countries. It is composed of three essays. The first essay (chapter 1) explores the roots of gender inequality favoring boys in education. It analyzes the effect of culture interaction with poor household economic on the school dropout probabilities of boys' and girls', using Malawi data. Malawi's suitability for this analysis stems from the coexistence in its territory of two different customs of post-marital residence for couples: patrilocal and matrilocal customs. Estimation results show that gender inequality in education is rooted in the interaction of household economic conditions and the custom of patrilocality—when a married couple settles near or with the husband's family after marriage. The essay concludes that public policies that make it unnecessary for parents to rely on traditional customs to organize their family life can eliminate gender inequality favoring boys' education. The last two essays analyze the issue of polygyny—when a man can have multiples wives simultaneously. This marriage institution has disappeared globally but remains confined in a cluster of sub-Saharan African countries, particularly in the Sahel region. Economic theory predicts that increasing women's education leads to the disappearance of polygyny. Still, empirical evidence is yet to establish this causal link, settling instead for a negative correlation between education and women's polygyny probabilities. The second essay examines the effect of education on women's polygyny probabilities, using primarily Uganda data. For identification, we use an estimation approach that jointly addresses sample selection and education endogeneity problems. We estimate a three-equation model comprising a polygyny (main) equation, a marriage (selection), and an education (endogeneity) equation. Estimation results confirm economic theory's prediction that increasing women's education leads to the disappearance of polygyny. The third and final essay provides evidence on the cause of the clustering of polygyny in drought-prone countries. Evidence shows that in village economies dependent on rainfed agriculture, the breakdown of informal risk-sharing arrangements following covariate shocks such as droughts increases the value of having a large family, both in size and composition, as a lever of resilience strategies. We find that polygyny allows households to build resilience to the adverse effects of drought on crop yields. These three essays contribute to advancing our knowledge of the barriers to gender inequalityin sub-Saharan Africa. It mainly draws attention to the importance for developing countries to invest in girls' schooling (Essay 2) and promote public policies that make it less attractive for parents to resort to traditional institutions to support their livelihoods (Essay 1). Additionally, policies such as those promoting smallholder farmers as a development strategy can contribute to the persistence of polygyny in drought-prone communities if done without weaning the rural population of its dependence on rainfed agriculture. In these settings, promoting resilience and adaptation strategies independent of household size can lead to polygyny and child marriage's disappearance (Essay 3).

Three Essays on Institutional Economics of Gender

Three Essays on Institutional Economics of Gender PDF Author: Maria Tackett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Gender, China and the World Trade Organization

Gender, China and the World Trade Organization PDF Author: Günseli Berik
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317989406
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
China’s joining the World Trade Organization at the end of 2001 signifies a milestone in the country’s global integration after two decades of economic reforms that have fundamentally transformed the economic organization of China. This collection seeks to identify the gendered implications within China of the country’s transition from socialism to a market economy and its opening up to international trade and investment. The changes have created greater wealth for some, while at the same time, serious gender, class, ethnic, and regional disparities have also emerged. Drawing from historical, analytical, and policy-oriented work, the essays in this collection explore women’s well-being relative to men’s in rural and urban China by looking at land rights, labor-market status and labor rights, household decision-making, health, the representation of women in advertising and beauty pageants. This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal, Feminist Economics, the official journal of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE). All contributions have been subjected to the journal's rigorous peer review process and comply with the journal's editorial policies, as overseen by the editor, Diana Strassmann, and the journal's editorial team, including the associate editors, the editorial board, numerous volunteer reviewers, and the journal's in-house editorial staff and freelance style editors. The special issue and book have been made possible by the generous financial support of Rice University and the Ford Foundation-Beijing.

Gender and the Life Course

Gender and the Life Course PDF Author: Alice Rossi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351329022
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 641

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Book Description
Gender and the Life Course is an interdisciplinary collection of essays on the lives of women and men as they are affected by history, culture, demography, economic and political stratification, and the biopsychological processes that attend maturation and aging. The book covers three major topics. Part I, which examines gender and the life course in broad historical perspective, includes a summary of recent work in biological ecology and primatology, and an analysis of the persistence of cultural and gender differences in role organization in societies undergoing the transition from agrarianism to industrialism. Other essays trace the changes in sources of household income of industrial workers over the life span, and review temporal and gender differences in life span transitions.Part II examines gender differentiation in a variety of contexts: psychological, psychobiologi-cal, and sociological. Alice Rossi's ASA Presidential Address reviews recent work on fathering and mothering, and argues that sociological explanations of such gender differences need supplementation by concepts from evolutionary theory and the neurosciences. Three essays deal with gender and economy: one shows how gender stratification took hold in the early stages of industrialization in France, another demonstrates the persistence of gender stratification in modern economies, the third focuses on ideology in relation to gender and political power.Part III examines various aspects of the aged in contemporary society, including an argument for an jnterpretive social science that uses diverse methods to improve our ability to describe and interpret many facets of the lives of elderly men and women; a review of the methodology used to study changes in the aged population over time; and an overview of existing data sets that permit further cohort and longitudinal analyses of the aged. The final essays review social policies as they affect the elderly, with particular attention to the fact that most very old people are women, and the impact of the greatly expanded life course for family and kin relations.Gender and the Life Course is a state-of-the-art assessment of the best work currently being done' on gender and age a's maturational factors and is essential reading for anyone interested in adult development and gender roles.

Three Essays on Children, Women and Economic Development

Three Essays on Children, Women and Economic Development PDF Author: Maria Anna Leone
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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There's No Such Thing as "The Economy"

There's No Such Thing as Author: Samuel A. Chambers
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1947447890
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Every Economics textbook today teaches that questions of values and morality lie outside of, are in fact excluded from, the field of Economics and its proper domain of study, "the economy." Yet the dominant cultural and media narrative in response to major economic crisis is almost always one of moral outrage. How do we reconcile this tension or explain this paradox by which Economics seems to have both everything and nothing to do with values? The discipline of modern economics hypostatizes and continually reifies a domain it calls "the economy"; only this epistemic practice makes it possible to falsely separate the question of value from the broader inquiry into the economic. And only if we have first eliminated value from the domain of economics can we then transform stories of financial crisis or massive corporate corruption into simple tales of ethics. But if economic forces establish, transform, and maintain relations of value then it proves impossible to separate economics from questions of value, because value relations only come to be in the world by way of economic logics. This means that the "positive economics" spoken of so fondly in the textbooks is nothing more than a contradiction in terms, and as this book demonstrates, there's no such thing as "the economy." To grasp the basic logic of capital is to bring into view the unbreakable link between economics and value.

Three Essays in Development Economics

Three Essays in Development Economics PDF Author: David Russell Hansen
Publisher: Stanford University
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
This dissertation is composed of three chapters. All three deal with topics in development economics. The first chapter examines the effects on village institutions of introducing formal financial institution options into the village. The second addresses the effects of government policy on educational investment and crime. The third tests the explanatory power of various explanations of the gender gap in math test scores. The first chapter examines the effects of a transition from a ``traditional'' economy based on an uncertain source of income, with risk fully insured away by one's neighbors in a social network through costly network ties, to a ``modern'' economy in which some agents have access to partial insurance at a lower cost. A theoretical model is used to show that village social networks can break down as some members of the village no longer need the insurance the social network provides, producing a reduction in welfare (if the costs of reducing moral hazard are not too high) for at least some individuals and possibly the village as a whole. This loss of welfare can occur even when networks provide other benefits to those belonging to them and is likely to be heterogeneous, depending on the opportunities and networks available to individuals. This paper tests these predictions using Indonesian data to examine the effect of a change in the banking institutions available to a community on the strength of social networks (measured by community participation) and welfare (measured by household expenditure and by child health). The analysis finds that changing financial institution availability in general does not influence community participation or welfare, but that financial institutions that primarily serve certain groups do relatively reduce the welfare of households not in those groups, which is consistent with the hypotheses generated by the model. Crime is an important feature of economic life in many countries, especially in the developing world. Crime distorts many economic decisions because it acts like an unpredictable tax on earnings. In particular, the threat of crime may influence people's willingness to invest in schooling or physical capital. The second chapter explores the questions "What influence do crime rates and levels of investment have on one another?" and "How do government policies affect the relationship between investment and crime?" by creating a simple structural model of crime and educational investment and attempting to fit this model to Mexican data. A method of simulated moments procedure is used to estimate parameters of the model and the estimated parameters are then used to carry out policy simulations. The simulations show that increasing spending on police or increasing the severity of punishment reduces crime but has little effect on educational investment. Increased educational subsidies increase educational investment but reduce crime only slightly. Thus, one type of policy is insufficient to accomplish the goals of both reducing crime and increasing education. The third chapter is joint work with Prashant Bharadwaj, Giacomo De Giorgi, and Christopher Neilson. Boys tend to have better performances than girls in mathematical testing; in particular, there are significantly more boys than girls among high achievers and the score distribution appears to have a longer right tail for boys. We confirm such results on several low- and middle-income countries. In particular we find that the gender gap is already present by age 10 and substantially increases by age 14 and 15. We propose and try to test a series of explanations for such a gap: (i) parental investment, (ii) ability, (iii) school resources, (iv) individual investment and effort (not tested directly), (v) competitive environment, and (vi) cultural norms. We conclude that none of our proposed explanations can account for a substantial portion of the gap.

Three Essays in Search of a Conversation

Three Essays in Search of a Conversation PDF Author: Sherman Lewis
Publisher: Hayward Area Planning Association
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
These essays are for Americans concerned about the future of our country and for policy wonks. By and large, the political process is controlled by those who take an intertest in politics, large in number but small as a percent of population. Are you a member of the political class? Membership is voluntary. Our first 800 years of thinking: science culture and empathy from the Enlightenment ~1600 to ~ 2400 The Crisis of the Anthropocene: The most comprehensive description of all issues of the crisis in less than 100 pages. For the purpose of going through your mind to influence your brain. Musings on our Present Discontent: America, not advanced, not a democracy. Right to life for baby; right to choose for mom. Taxation. The security of a free state. Issues not discussed. The threat from within, Trumpism. The threat from without: Putinism. How to participate. Renewal.

Three Essays and Three Revolutions

Three Essays and Three Revolutions PDF Author: Francis Goskowski
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing
ISBN: 1622123182
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
If you have ever wondered why American Catholics and American Protestants in the mainline denominations in 2011 believe and worship in very similar ways; why Democrats and Republicans accept the necessity of governmental intervention to secure the "safety net" of services citizens may need to access at various times in their lives; and why average American workers in their pivotal role as producers and consumers of goods and services "own" the nation's economy; Three Essays and Three Revolutions is the book for you.Author Francis Goskowski argues that Martin Luther, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Karl Marx, three "Founding Fathers" of the modern world, are responsible for the "big ideas" that have shaped current thinking in religion, politics, and economics. By closely examining one important work of each thinker, the author shows how the revolutionary concepts Luther, Rousseau, and Marx advanced, provoked fierce opposition within the prevailing order, but ultimately gained acceptance in all circles, evidenced by the fundamental agreement on religious liberty, civic equality, and economic justice apparent throughout the Western world today.This eloquently written, thought-provoking, and sensibly priced collection of essays...is timely and long overdue. Three Essays and Three Revolutions is the sort of wonderful book of which any aspiring writer might wish to claim authorship. I am sure that it will be wisely read, thoughtfully debated, and much treasured in the years ahead. - John Quentin Feller, Ph.D., K.H.S., former professor of history and historical consultant to the late Cardinal Lawrence J. Shehan and retired Cardinal William H. Keeler, 12th and 14th Archbishops of Baltimore respectively.