Female labor force participation rates across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have remained low for over four decades, despite the fact that in the same period, women's education rapidly increased and fertility rates substantially decreased. This surprising phenomenon has remained...

In the past twenty years, India's economy has grown at increasing rates and now belongs to the fastest-growing economies in the world. This paper examines drivers of female labor force participation in urban India between 1987 and 2004, showing a much more nuanced picture of female labor force...

During World War II, more than one-half million tons of bombs were dropped in aerial raids on German cities, destroying about forty percent of the total housing stock nationwide. With a large fraction of the male population gone, the reconstruction process had mainly fallen on women in postwar...

This article analyzes married women's labor supply responses to their husbands' job loss (added worker effect) and worsening of unemployment conditions (discouraged worker effect). We find that married women whose husbands are unemployed or underemployed are more likely to participate in the...

This paper assesses whether a causal relationship exists between recent increases in female labor force participation and the increased prevalence of obesity amongst women. The expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the 1980s and 1990s have been established by prior literature as...

This paper investigates the impact of openness to trade and higher levels of human capital on the economies of some MENA countries. To answer the question: whether either human capital or openness can be shown to cause productivity, we use panel data on 16 countries spanning the 1965 -2000...

We use an implicit association test (IAT) to measure implicit gender attitudes and examine the malleability of these attitudes using a randomized field experiment and quasi-experimental data from Tunisia. Women that appear most conservative respond to a randomized video treatment by reducing...

This paper identifies gaps in availability, access, and quality of household budget surveys in the Middle East and North Africa region used to measure monetary poverty and evaluates ways to fill these information gaps. Despite improving public access to household budget surveys, the availability...

This article examines the trends in women's economic outcomes in the United States focusing primarily on labor force participation, occupational attainment, and the gender wage gap. The author first highlights considerable progress on all dimensions prior to the 1990s followed by a slowing or...

We develop an equilibrium model of the labor market to investigate the joint evolution of gender gaps in labor force participation and wages. We do this overall and by task-based occupation and skill, which allows us to study distributional effects. We structurally estimate the model using data...