Women tend to experience substantial declines in their labor income after their first child is born, while men do not. Do such "child penalties" also exist in the political arena? Using extensive administrative data from Norway and an event-study methodology, we find that women drop out of local...

Do policies and institutions that promote women's economic empowerment have a long-term impact on intimate partner violence? We address this question by exploiting a natural experiment of history in Cameroon. From the end of WWI until 1961, the western territories of today's Cameroon were...

Using German administrative data from the 1960s onward, this paper (i) examines the long-term evolution of child-related gender inequality in earnings and (ii) assesses the impact of family policies on this inequality. We present three sets of findings. First, child penalties (i.e., the...

Civil war is often caused by poverty, and further demolishes existing capital. Such a vicious circle is detrimental for economic development of countries experiencing civil war. Civil war may also contribute to creative destructions of traditional economic, social and political system, leading...

This study examines the five-year impacts of a bicycle distribution program for adolescent girls in rural Zambia, implemented across 91 schools as part of a randomized controlled trial. While the program increased girls’ self-reported empowerment and reduced experiences of domestic and...

We propose a new method to design a short survey measure of a complex concept such as women's agency. The approach combines mixed-methods data collection and machine learning. We select the best survey questions based on how strongly correlated they are with a "gold standard" measure of the...

What is the role of politics in shaping attitudes about appropriate roles for women in the family and the compatibility of work and motherhood? In this paper we argue that the German separation and later reunification produced a natural experiment to address this question. During the divided...

Reducing the gender gap in education is a primary goal for many countries. Some major challenges for many girls include the distance to school, their safety when commuting to school, lack of agency, and deep-rooted cultural norms. In Zambia, we studied the impact of providing a bicycle to a...

Empirical evidence suggests that money in the hands of mothers (as opposed to fathers) increases expenditures on children. From this, should we infer that targeting transfers to women is good economic policy? In this paper, we develop a non-cooperative model of household decision making to...

We analyze the effect of the introduction of gender quotas in candidate lists on the quality of elected politicians. We consider an Italian law which introduced gender quotas in local elections in 1993, and was abolished in 1995. As not all municipalities went through elections during the period...