Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP6771
Authors: Matthias Doepke; Michèle Tertilt
Abstract: The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic improvements in the legal rights of married women. Given that these changes took place long before women gained the right to vote, they amounted to a voluntary renouncement of power by men. In this paper, we investigate men's incentives for sharing power with women. In our model, women's legal rights set the marital bargaining power of husbands and wives. We show that men face a tradeoff between the rights they want for their own wives (namely none) and the rights of other women in the economy. Men prefer other men's wives to have rights because men care about their own daughters and because an expansion of women's rights increases educational investments in children. We show that men may agree to relinquish some of their power once technological change increases the importance of human capital. We corroborate our argument with historical evidence on the expansion of women's rights in England and the United States.
Keywords: Economic Growth; Human Capital; Political Economy; Return to Education; Women's Rights
JEL Codes: D13; E13; J16; N30; O43
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Improvements in married women's legal rights (J12) | Women's bargaining power relative to their husbands (J12) |
| Women's bargaining power relative to their husbands (J12) | Men's preferences for their daughters' future husbands (J12) |
| Men's preferences for their daughters' future husbands (J12) | Enhanced human capital accumulation (J24) |
| As the return to education increases (I26) | Men have a stronger incentive to support women's rights (J16) |
| Technological change (O33) | Expansion of women's rights (J16) |