When other measures for economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, the body mass index (BMI) is a biological measure that reflects current net nutrition. This study uses a difference-in-decompositions framework to analyze how women's BMIs varied with the advent of early 20th century social...

While still far from parity, female representation in politics has continuously increased over the last two decades worldwide. In light of this development, we analyze whether higher female representation has substantive effects on policy choices using the example of child care – a public good...

We explore the role of financial and pension information in increasing women's knowledge and awareness of their future pension status, and consequently, in reducing the gender pension gap. A representative sample of 1249 Italian working women were interviewed to assess their knowledge about...

This paper studies the origins and function of customs aimed at restricting women's sexuality, such as a particularly invasive form of female genital cutting, restrictions on women's freedom of mobility, and norms about their sexual behavior. The analysis tests the anthropological theory that a...

Adding to the corruption-gender nexus, this paper contributes across several dimensions: (a) measurement of corruption by studying whether female managers and female owners of firms perceived corruption differently; (b) using survey information at the firm level; and (c) employing a large sample...

This paper investigates how high school gender composition affects students' participation in STEM at college. Using Danish administrative data, we exploit idiosyncratic within-school variation in gender composition. We find that having a larger proportion of female peers reduces women's...

Gender norms, i.e. the role of men and women in the society, are a fundamental channel through which culture may influence preferences for redistribution and public policies. We consider both cross-country and individual level evidence on this mechanism. We find that in countries that are...

Using new survey data collected in April 2020 from a representative sample of Italian women, we analyse jointly the effect of COVID-19 on the working arrangements, housework and childcare of couples where both partners work. ties. According to our empirical estimates, changes to the amount of...

Fertility has a strong biological component generally ignored by economists. Using the UK Biobank, we analyze the extent to which genes, proxied by polygenic scores, and the environment, proxied by early exposure to the contraceptive pill diffusion, affect age at first sexual intercourse, age at...

How much does your neighbor impact your test scores and career? In this paper, we examine how an observable characteristic of same-age neighbors—their gender—affects a variety of high school and university outcomes. We exploit randomness in the gender composition of local cohorts at birth...