Women’s Rights and Development

Why has the expansion of women’s economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question, focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and declining fertility) exacerbated the tension in men’s conflicting interests as husbands versus fathers, ultimately resolving them in favor of the latter. As husbands, men stood to gain from their privileged position in a patriarchal world whereas, as fathers, they were hurt by a system that afforded few rights to their daughters. The model predicts that declining fertility would hasten reform of women’s property rights whereas legal systems that were initially more favorable to women would delay them. The theoretical relationship between capital and the relative attractiveness of reform is non-monotonic but growth inevitably leads to reform. I explore the empirical validity of the theoretical predictions by using cross-state variation in the US in the timing of married women obtaining property and earning rights between 1850 and 1920.Women’s Rights, Property Rights, Economic Development

Does Culture Matter?

This paper reviews the literature on culture and economics, focusing primarily on the epidemiological approach. The epidemiological approach studies the variation in outcomes across different immigrant groups residing in the same country. Immigrants presumably differ in their cultures but share a common institutional and economic environment. This allows one to separate the effect of culture from the original economic and institutional environment. This approach has been used to study a variety of issues, including female labor force participation, fertility, labor market regulation, redistribution, growth, and financial development among others.culture, beliefs, preferences, norms

Semantic Variation in Online Communities of Practice

We introduce a framework for quantifying semantic variation of common words in Communities of Practice and in sets of topic-related communities. We show that while some meaning shifts are shared across related communities, others are community-specific, and therefore independent from the discussed topic. We propose such findings as evidence in favour of sociolinguistic theories of socially-driven semantic variation. Results are evaluated using an independent language modelling task. Furthermore, we investigate extralinguistic features and show that factors such as prominence and dissemination of words are related to semantic variation.Comment: 13 pages, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2017

Fertility: The Role of Culture and Family Experience

This paper attempts to disentangle the direct effects of experience from those of culture in determining fertility. We use the GSS to examine the fertility of women born in the US but from different ethnic backgrounds. We take lagged values of the total fertility rate in the woman's country of ancestry as the cultural proxy and use the woman's number of siblings to capture her direct family experience. We find that both variables are significant determinants of fertility, even after controlling for several individual and family-level characteristics.

Diversity and Redistribution

This paper examines how preference heterogeneity affects the ability of the poor to extract resources from the rich. We study the equilibrium of a game in which coalitions of individuals form parties, parties propose platforms, and all individuals vote, with the winning policy chosen by plurality. Political parties are restricted to offering platforms that are credible (in that they belong to the Pareto set of their members). The platforms specify the values of two policy tools: a general redistributive tax which is lumpsum rebated and a series of taxes whose revenue is used to fund specific (targeted) goods. We show that taste conflict first dilutes but later reinforces class interests. When the degree of taste diversity is low, the equilibrium policy is characterized by some amount of general income redistribution and some targeted transfers. As taste diversity increases in society, the set of equilibrium policies becomes more and more tilted towards special interest groups and against general redistribution. As diversity increases further, however, only general redistribution survives.

Are there biological gender differences at the early stages of first language acquisition when producing double object constructions and to/for-datives?

Producción CientíficaThis study examines whether biological gender differences appear in the early stages of acquisition in the case of English dative alternation (DA) structures (double object constructions (DOCs) and to/for-datives). Girls have been found to show faster syntactic development when compared to boys (Lovas, 2011). In the case of the acquisition of DA, an order in the emergence and in the incidence of English DA would entail a syntactic derivational status between DOCs and to/for-datives with one being the original structure and the other the derived one (Gu, 2010). However, analogous ages of onset and fairly similar frequency rates in the production could suggest the construction of two underived structures. We investigate whether biological gender differences appear in the case of DOCs and to/for-datives. We also investigate whether the exposure to English DA (adult input) results in differences between the girls’ output and the boys’ output. We analyze data from eight monolingual English girls and five monolingual English boys, and the adults that interact with them, as available in CHILDES. Our findings reveal that monolingual girls and monolingual boys pattern closely in the acquisition of the syntactic non-derivational relationship between DOCs and to/for-datives, as seen in their similar emergence. Biological gender differences are not seen either in the acquisition of the additional properties of to/for-datives given their later onset and their lower incidence when compared to DOCs. These production patterns also correlate with the frequency with which these structures are heard in the adult input.Junta de Castilla y León (programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación - Ref. VA009P17)Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (ref. PGC2018-097693-B-I00

Una Propuesta Metodológica para el Uso de la Poesía en el Aula de Inglés como Lengua Extranjera

Muchos profesores son verdaderos lectores entusiastas, sin embargo, a la hora de introducir textos literarios en el aula, la mayoría de ellos encuentra complicado tanto seleccionar material adecuado, como diseñar actividades apropiadas para éste. Esta tarea parece especialmente ardua cuando se trata de abordar la poesía, ya que la mayor parte de las orientaciones metodológicas se orientan hacia el uso de relatos o novela. En este artículo propongo un uso más extensivo de la poesía en el aula mediante la utilización de una metodología cuyas técnicas son realizables en el aula. Además de aportar recomendaciones\ud generales acerca del diseño de actividades basadas en este enfoque metodológico, también se ejemplifican de manera más particular trabajando un poema

The Disappearing Gender Gap: The Impact of Divorce, Wages, and Preferences on Education Choices and Women's Work

Women born in 1935 went to college significantly less than their male counterparts and married women's labor force participation (LFP) averaged 40% between the ages of thirty and forty. The cohort born twenty years later behaved very differently. The education gender gap was eliminated and married women's LFP averaged 70% over the same ages. In order to evaluate the quantitative contributions of the many significant changes in the economic environment, family structure, and social norms that occurred over this period, this paper develops a dynamic life-cycle model calibrated to data relevant to the 1935 cohort. We find that the higher probability of divorce and the changes in wage structure faced by the 1955 cohort are each able to explain, in isolation, a large proportion (about 60%) of the observed changes in female LFP. After combining all economic and family structure changes, we find that a simple change in preferences towards work can account for the remaining change in LFP. To eliminate the education gender gap requires, on the other hand, for the psychic cost of obtaining higher education to change asymmetrically for women versus men.divorce, labor force participation, gender gap, education and skill premium

Analysing Lexical Semantic Change with Contextualised Word Representations

This paper presents the first unsupervised approach to lexical semantic change that makes use of contextualised word representations. We propose a novel method that exploits the BERT neural language model to obtain representations of word usages, clusters these representations into usage types, and measures change along time with three proposed metrics. We create a new evaluation dataset and show that the model representations and the detected semantic shifts are positively correlated with human judgements. Our extensive qualitative analysis demonstrates that our method captures a variety of synchronic and diachronic linguistic phenomena. We expect our work to inspire further research in this direction.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2020