Abstract
The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic improvements in the legal rights of married women. Given that they took place long before women gained the right to vote, these changes amounted to a voluntary renunciation of power by men. In this paper, we investigate men's incentives for sharing power with women. In our model, women's legal rights set the marital bargaining power of husbands and wives. We show that men face a trade-off between the rights they want for their own wives (namely none) and the rights of other women in the economy. Men prefer other men's wives to have rights because men care about their own daughters and because an expansion of women's rights increases educational investments in children. We show that men may agree to relinquish some of their power once technological change increases the importance of human capital. We corroborate our argument with historical evidence on the expansion of women's rights in England and the United States.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1541-1591 |
| Number of pages | 51 |
| Journal | Quarterly Journal of Economics |
| Volume | 124 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 2009 |
Funding
∗We thank Stefania Albanesi, Doug Bernheim, Paul David, Jeremy Greenwood, Bob Hall, Caroline Hoxby, Simon Johnson, Chad Jones, Larry Jones, Ethan Kaplan, Pete Klenow, John Knowles, Yishay Maoz, Bob Pollak, and José-Víctor Ríos-Rull, as well as the audiences at a number of conferences and seminars, for their valuable comments. We also thank four anonymous referees and Robert Barro and Lawrence Katz (the editors) for comments that helped to substantially improve the paper. Financial support from the National Science Foundation (Grants SES-0820409 and SES-0748889), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Michelle Clayman Institute is gratefully acknowledged. Simeon Alder, Wendi Goh, Alejandrina Salcedo, and William Gui Woolston provided excellent research assistance. Part of this research was completed while Tertilt was visiting the University of Pennsylvania during academic year 2006/2007. [email protected], [email protected].
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Economics and Econometrics
