The Impact of Extended Reproductive Time Horizons: Evidence from Israel\u27s Expansion of Access to IVF

Women’s time-limited fertility window, compared to men’s longer period of fecundity, could be a key constraint shaping the gender gap in career choices and hence outcomes. Israel’s 1994 policy change to make in vitro fertilization free provides a natural experiment for how fertility time horizons impact women’s investment choices. We find that following the policy change women marry later, complete more college education, achieve more post-college education, and have better labor market outcomes. Additionally, we find the “penalty” in spousal quality for women who get married after thirty substantially dissipates. This suggests that persistent labor market inequality may be partly rooted in biological asymmetries, and policies that protect against age-related infertility or relieve the career-family tradeoff could have far-reaching impacts

Betting the House: How Assets Influence Marriage Selection, Marital Stability, and Child Investments

Marriage used to be practically universal, but now persists as an institution for only some groups, while others choose non-marital fertility. This paper posits that if one role of marriage is to insure one partner\u27s investment in children, then home-ownership can be seen as providing the necessary collateral for this contract. As easier divorce and paternity enforcement outside of marriage have reduced the relative strength of the marital contract, the division of assets, particularly the family home, post-separation has remained unique to marriage. We provide a model where husbands can ante up the marital home to elicit more optimal child investments, whose costs are born mostly by the mother, by reducing the chance of divorce while providing consumption insurance to their partner. This, in turn, increases the value of marriage for those able to access this collateralized version of the contract. The model predicts that individuals able to buy a home at the time of marriage will invest more in children and have greater labor specialization, while policy changes that eroded marriage\u27s relative commitment value would have heterogenous effects by asset-holding, both of which appear to hold in US data

What Happens the Morning After? The Costs and Benefits of Expanding Access to Emergency Contraception

Emergency contraception (EC) can prevent pregnancy after sex, but only if taken within 72 hours of intercourse. Over the past 15 years, access to EC has been expanded at both the state and federal level. This paper studies the impact of those policies. We find that expanded access to EC has had no statistically significant effect on birth or abortion rates. Expansions of access, however, have changed the venue in which the drug is obtained, shifting its provision from hospital emergency departments to pharmacies. We find evidence that this shift may have led to a decrease in reports of sexual assaul

Essays in Gender Economics

This dissertation examines women's choices regarding reproduction, sexual activity, and marriage in an economic framework. The first two chapters address the impact of the "biological clock" on women's marriage market outcomes, and thus its implications for career decisions. Women's ability to have children declines sharply with age. This fecundity loss may negatively affect marital prospects for women who delay marriage to make career investments. In chapter 1, I incorporate depreciating "reproductive capital" into a frictionless matching model of the marriage market, where high-skilled women are likely to make pre-marital career investments. When the fertility costs of these investments are large relative to the income gains, the model predicts non-assortative matching at the top of the income distribution, with the highest-earning men forgoing the highest-earning women in favor of poorer, but younger, partners. However, if women's incomes rise or desired family size falls, high-skilled women may be able to compensate their partners for lower fertility, leading to assortative matching. Historical patterns in US Census data are consistent with these predictions. In the 1920-1950 birth cohorts, women with post-bachelors education match with lower-income spouses than women with only college degrees, while in recent years this pattern has reversed. The model relies on men internalizing their partners' expected fertility when choosing a mate. In chapter 2, I test this premise using an online experiment where age is randomly assigned to dating profiles, to control for other factors (such as beauty) that change with age in observational data. I find that men, in contrast to women, have a strong preference for younger partners, but only when they have no children of their own and are aware of the age-fertility tradeoff. Chapter 3 addresses another decision, protecting against unintended pregnancy, in the context of the introduction of a new technology that can prevent pregnancy after intercourse. Emergency contraception (EC) can prevent pregnancy after sex, but only if taken within 72 hours of intercourse. Over the past 15 years, access to EC has been expanded at both the state and federal level. We find that expanded access to EC has had no statistically significant effect on birth or abortion rates. Expansions of access, however, have changed the venue in which the drug is obtained, shifting its provision from hospital emergency departments to pharmacies. We find evidence that this shift may have led to a decrease in reports of sexual assault

Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Inter-generational Investment

Using a randomized control trial, we examine whether offering adolescent girls non-material resources -- specifically, negotiation skills -- can improve educational outcomes in a low-income country. In so doing, we provide the first evidence on the effects of an intervention that increased non-cognitive, interpersonal skills during adolescence. Long-run administrative data shows that negotiation training significantly improved educational outcomes over the next three years. The training had greater effects than two alternative treatments (offering girls a safe physical space with female mentors and offering girls information about the returns to education), suggesting that negotiation skills themselves drive the effect. Further evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment, which simulates parents\u27 educational investment decisions, and a midline survey suggests that negotiation skills improved girls\u27 outcomes by moving households\u27 human capital investments closer to the efficient frontier. This is consistent with an incomplete contracting model, where negotiation allows daughters to strategically cooperate with parents

The effects of home-based HIV counseling and testing on HIV/AIDS stigma among individuals and community leaders in western Kenya: Evidence from a cluster-randomized trial 1,2

HIV counseling and testing services play an important role in HIV treatment and prevention efforts in developing countries. Community-wide testing campaigns to detect HIV earlier may additionally impact community knowledge and beliefs about HIV. We conducted a cluster-randomized evaluation of a home-based HIV testing campaign in western Kenya and evaluated the effects of the campaign on community leaders’ and members’ stigma toward people living with HIV/AIDS. We find that this type of large-scale HIV testing can be implemented successfully in the presence of stigma, perhaps due to its “whole community” approach. The home-based HIV testing intervention resulted in community leaders reporting lower levels of stigma. However, stigma among community members reacted in mixed ways, and there is little evidence that the program affected beliefs about HIV prevalence and prevention

Negotiating a better future: how interpersonal skills facilitate intergenerational investment

Using a randomized controlled trial, we study whether a negotiation skills training can improve girls' educational outcomes in a low-resource environment. We find that a negotiation training given to eighth-grade Zambian girls significantly improved educational outcomes over the next three years, and these effects did not fade out. To better understand mechanisms, we estimate the effects of two alternative treatments. Negotiation had much stronger effects than an informational treatment, which had no effect. A treatment designed to have more traditional girls' empowerment effects had directionally positive but insignificant educational effects. Relative to this treatment, negotiation increased enrollment in higher-quality schooling and had larger effects for high-ability girls. These findings are consistent with a model in which negotiation allows girls to resolve incomplete contracting problems with their parents, yielding increased educational investment for those who experience sufficiently high returns. We provide evidence for this channel through a lab-in-the-field game and follow-up survey with girls and their guardians

Replication Data for: 'Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Intergenerational Investment'

The data and programs replicate tables and figures from "Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Intergenerational Investment", by Ashraf, Bau, Low and McGinn. Please see the Readme file for additional details

Success factors and firm performance

49 p.This research examines how an entrepreneur's personality, experience, practice of business planning and networking relates to the performance of a firm. The study is based on data collected from 168 entrepreneurs in Singapore.ACCOUNTANC

Women's Well-Being During a Pandemic and its Containment

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the dual crises of disease and the containment policies designed to mitigate it. Yet, there is little evidence on the impacts of these policies on women, who are likely to be especially vulnerable, in lower-income countries. We conduct a large phone survey and leverage India's geographically-varying containment policies to estimate the association between both the pandemic and its containment policies, and measures of women's well-being, including mental health and food security. On aggregate, the pandemic resulted in dramatic income losses, increases in food insecurity, and declines in female mental health. While potentially crucial to stem the spread of COVID-19 cases, we find that greater prevalence of containment policies is associated with increased food insecurity, particularly for women, and with reduced female mental health. Average containment levels are associated with a 39-40% increase in the likelihood of sadness, depression, and hopelessness among women and with an increase in the likelihood that women feel more worried by 45% of the variable mean. Particularly vulnerable groups of women, those with daughters and those living in female-headed households, experience larger declines in mental health