This paper uses information on the frequency of 45,397 Facebook interests to study how the difference in preferences between men and women changes with a country's degree of gender equality. For preference dimensions that are systematically biased toward the same gender across the globe,...

Expectations about macro-finance variables, such as inflation, vary significantly across genders, even within the same household. We conjecture that traditional gender roles expose women and men to different economic signals in their daily lives, which in turn produce systematic variation in...

In most of the developed world, skilled women marry at a lower rate than unskilled women. We document heterogeneity across countries in how the marriage gap for skilled women has evolved over time. As labor market opportunities for women have improved, the marriage gap has been growing in some...

What determines beliefs about the ability and appropriate role of women? An overwhelming majority of men and women born early in the 20th century thought women should not work; a majority now believes that work is appropriate for both genders. Betty Friedan (1963) postulated that beliefs about...

We investigate the potential welfare cost of relative rank considerations using a series of vignettes and lab-in-the-field experiments with over 2,000 individuals in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. We show that: (1) individuals judged to be of a lower rank are perceived as more likely to be sidelined from...

The fraction of U.S. college graduate women entering professional programs increased substantially around 1970 and the age at first marriage among all U.S. college graduate women soared just after 1972. We explore the relationship between these two changes and how each was shaped by the...

Using the 1970, 1980 and 1990 Censuses, we investigate the impact of labor and marriage market conditions on the incidence of marriage of young women (age 16-24). We employ a two-stage methodology. First, across individuals, marriage is regressed on personal characteristics and MSA indicators,...

Women enter retirement having spent fewer years in market work, earned less over their lifetimes, and worked in different jobs than men of the same age. This study examines whether these differences in work-life experiences help explain why many women end up with lower levels of retirement...

A unique survey of Shanghai residents in 1996 that combined labor-market information, appraisals of respondents' beauty, and household expenditures allows us to examine the relative magnitudes of the investment and consumption components of women's spending on beauty-enhancing goods and...

I show that the trend towards single households among older nonmarried women, the majority of whom were widows, has been ongoing only since 1940 and investigate the factors that fostered the rise in separate living quarters since mid-century by examining the impact of Old Age Assistance on...