Societal norms about gender roles contribute to the economic disadvantages facing women in many developing countries. This paper evaluates an intervention aimed at eroding support for restrictive gender norms, specifically a multi-year school-based intervention in Haryana, India, that engaged...

Public spending on gender equality and women's empowerment is rising rapidly in many countries. However, the unintended consequences of women's empowerment is rarely measured and remains poorly understood. We study the impact of female empowerment programs on male backlash through a series of...

This paper examines the role of spousal trust in intra-household decision making through its potential of inciting the creation of information asymmetries in the presence of resource unobservability. We experimentally elicit spousal trust and trustworthiness by means of a binary trust game to...

We implement a binary trust game between 211 married couples from lowincome households in urban India. In a separate experiment, these spouses randomly received either only a joint savings device (control) or, additionally, a device for individual usage (treatment). Combining data from both...

This paper studies the effect of women's higher education on fertility outcomes in Ethiopia. We exploit an abrupt increase in the supply of tertiary education induced by a deregulation policy. Using an age discontinuity in the exposure to higher education reform, we find that education lowers...

At the heart of economic and sociological thinking on divorce lies the idea that a couple divorces if at least one spouse expects to improve their life in doing so. De facto, divorces are predominantly initiated by one spouse alone. This might suggest that one spouse typically benefits from...

Long paternity leaves have the potential for lasting effects on parental unions, potentially reducing specialization and increasing union stability and fertility. We put these hypotheses to a causal test, using an extension of the Norwegian parental leave father's quota from 6 to 10 weeks as a...

Research exploiting data on classic (offline) couple formation has confirmed predictions from evolutionary psychology in a sense that males attach more value to attractiveness and women attach more value to earnings potential. We examine whether these human partner preferences survive in a...

The practice of child marriage is ubiquitous in developing countries, where one in three girls is married before the age of 18. Although most developing countries have a legal minimum age of marriage, in practice marriage age is determined by social norms rather than the law. In this paper, we...