This paper uses a field experiment to test whether intrahousehold heterogeneity in discount factors leads to inefficient strategic savings behavior. I gave married couples in rural Kenya the opportunity to open both joint and individual bank accounts at randomly assigned interest rates. I also...

Previous research has not always found that boys and girls are treated differently in rural India. However estimates of the effect of gender on parental investments could be biased if girls end up in larger families due to son-biased stopping rules. Using a novel identification strategy that...

This paper explores the importance of the home and school environments in explaining the gender gap in disruptive behavior. We document large differences in the gender gap across key features of the home environment -- boys do especially poorly in broken families. In contrast, we find little...

We assemble a novel dataset to study the impact of male scarcity on marital assortative matching and other marriage market outcomes using the large shock that WWI caused to the number of French men. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that postwar in regions with higher mortality...

I explore how a gender's scarcity may impact educational investments using exogenous variation in the marriage market of second generation Americans in early twentieth century. I find that worse marriage market conditions spur higher pre-marital investments: the effect for males is significant,...

We report on a field experiment providing random grants to microenterprise owners. The grants generated large profit increases for male owners but not for female owners. We show that the gender gap does not simply mask differences in ability, risk aversion, entrepreneurial attitudes, or...

Does limited access to formal savings services impede business growth in poor countries? To shed light on this question, we randomized access to noninterest-bearing bank accounts among two types of self-employed individuals in rural Kenya: market vendors (who are mostly women) and men working as...

Policy-makers have cited menstruation and lack of sanitary products as barriers to girls' schooling. We evaluate these claims using a randomized evaluation of sanitary products provision to girls in Nepal. We report two findings. First, menstruation has a very small impact on school attendance....

This paper considers the role of marriage in improving labor market outcomes through the expansion of an individual's networks. I focus on the impact of the relationship with the father-in-law on a young man's career using panel data from China. The identification strategy isolates the network...

Almost 50 years after domestic US family planning programs began, their effects on childbearing remain controversial. Using the county-level roll-out of these programs from 1964 to 1973, this paper reevaluates their shorter and longer term effects on US fertility rates. I find that the...