Does female empowerment promote economic development?
By Matthias Doepke, Michèle Tertilt. Journal of economic growth (Boston), 2011
252 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Empirical evidence suggests that money in the hands of mothers (as opposed to fathers) increases expenditures on children. Does this imply that targeting transfers to women promotes economic development? Not necessarily. We consider a noncooperative model of the household where a gender wage gap leads to endogenous household specialization. As a result, women indeed spend more on children and invest more in human capital. Yet, depending on the nature of the production function, targeting transfers to women may be beneficial or harmful to growth. Transfers to women are more likely to be beneficial when human capital, rather than physical capital or land, is the most important factor of production. We provide empirical evidence supportive of our mechanism: In Mexican PROGRESA data, transfers to women lead to an increase in spending on children, but a decline in the savings rate.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1162704c2dcc329f02e81f6c1a86cc9b77e3e884
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Citations in the corpus
- Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Intergenerational Investment* (2018, unknown): “Second, this paper contributes to a growing literature on intra-household bargaining and inefficiencies in investment within the household (Udry, 1996; Ashraf, 2009; De Mel et al., 2009; Bobonis, 2009; Doepke and Tertilt, 2014; Robinson, 2012; Schaner, 2015; Angelucci and Garlick, 2016; Corno and Vo”
- Women’s Empowerment and Economic Development: A Feminist Critique of Storytelling Practices in “Randomista” Economics (2020, background): “The most explicit argument in favor of the position that broad-based development can be relied on to promote gender equality is attributed to Doepke and Tertilt (2009), who carried out a study to explain why the legal recognition of women’s economic rights preceded by several decades their…”