Economists long have argued that the severe sex imbalance that exists in many developing countries is caused by underlying economic conditions. This paper uses plausibly exogenous increases in sex-specific agricultural income caused by post-Mao reforms in China to estimate the effects of total...

Strengthening the relationship of accountability between health service providers and citizens is by many people viewed as critical for improving access to and quality of health care. How this is to be achieved, and whether it works, however, remain open questions. This paper presents a...

Both cognitive and non-cognitive skills matter to understand a child's opportunities and outcomes in adulthood. However, it is unclear how non-cognitive skills are acquired and what the role played by household investments is in this process. Motivated by suggestions from the medical literature...

In 1984, the world was shocked at the scale of a famine in Ethiopia that caused over half a million deaths, making it one of the worst in recent history. The mortality impacts are clearly signicant. But what of the survivors? This paper provides the first estimates the long-term impact of the...

We present a theoretical explanation of the gender wage gap that turns on the interaction between men and women in households. In equilibria where men are over-represented in full-time work, we show that firms rationally choose to hire women only at strictly lower wages to men. The model...

Consider a model with two types of jobs. The profitability of promoting a worker to a fast-track job depends not only on his or her observable talent, but also on incontractible effort. We investigate whether self-fulfilling expectations may lead to women meeting tougher promotion standards than...

This paper models gender discrimination in the labor market as originating from bargaining between husbands and wives within the family. The husband-wife household bargains over resource distribution, with each spouse's bargaining power determined by his/her market income. Men are reluctant to...

In almost all European Union countries, the gender wage gap is increasing across the wages distribution. In this lecture I briefly survey some recent studies aiming to explain why apparently identical women and men receive such different returns and focus especially on those incorporating...