Billions of women still face legal barriers to economic inclusion, yet it is unclear whether lifting these barriers is sufficient to enhance their economic participation. We conduct a field experiment to quantify the impact of a major legal reform - the lifting of the Saudi women's driving ban -...

This paper explores how historical gender roles become entrenched as norms over the long run. In the historical United States, gender roles on the frontier looked starkly different from those in settled areas. Male-biased sex ratios led to higher marriage rates for women and lower for men. Land...

We develop a method to identify the individual latent propensity to select into treatment and marginal treatment effects. Identification is achieved with survey data on individuals' subjective expectations of their treatment propensity and of their treatment-contingent outcomes. We use the...

This paper combines personnel records of the U.S. federal government with census data to study how shocks to the gender composition of a large organization can persistently shift gender norms. Exploiting city-by-department variation in the sudden expansion of female clerical employment driven by...

Reducing gender-specific commuting barriers in developing countries has complex and diverse effects on women's labor dynamics. We study a program that offers free bus rides for women in several Indian states (the Pink Slip program) using a synthetic difference-in-differences approach to shed...

We study how peer beliefs shape individual attitudes toward maternal labor supply using realistic hypothetical scenarios that elicit recommendations on the labor supply choices of a mother with a young child and an information treatment embedded within representative surveys. Across the...

We provide the first systematic account of summer declines in women's labor market activity. From May to July, the employment-to-population ratio among prime-age US women declines by 1.1 percentage points, whereas male employment rises; women's total hours worked fall by 9.8 percent, more than...

Employment and participation rates for US prime age women rose steadily during the second half of the 20th century. In the last 30 years, however, those rates stagnated, even as employment and participation rates for women in other industrialized countries continued to rise. I discuss the role...

Most of the literature on how immigration affects the labor market focuses on the outcomes of natives in direct competition with immigrants. This paper reviews a growing literature on an alternative channel. Immigrants, particularly low-skilled women, are disproportionately represented in the...

This chapter reviews key literature studying the effects of wars on minority and underrepresented groups in U.S. labor markets in the 20th century. These labor markets, characterized by historically pervasive barriers to entry into certain occupations and industries, promotions, and fair pay for...