Economic studies typically underestimate incremental changes in consumer goods and design innovations that enhance allocative efficiency and structural dynamics. This paper assesses over 12,000 innovations by female patentees and participants in industrial fairs and prize-granting institutions...

This chapter focuses on women, work, and family, with a particular focus on differences by educational attainment. First, we review long-term trends regarding family structure, participation in the labor market, and time spent in household production, including time with children. In looking at...

Researchers from economics, sociology, psychology, and other disciplines have studied the persistent under-representation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This chapter summarizes this research. We argue that women's under-representation is concentrated in the...

Changes in childbearing affect almost every aspect of human existence. Over the last fifty years, American women have experienced dramatic changes in the ease and convenience of timing and limiting childbearing, ranging from the introduction of the birth control pill and the legalization of...

This paper summarizes research on gender differences in economic settings. I discuss gender differences in attitudes toward competition, altruism and the closely related issue of cooperation, and risk preferences. While gender differences in competition are large and robust, the results are much...

We study associations among women's current marital status, past marital history, and later-life labor force participation. We first document these relationships using data from the 1986 to 2008 waves of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). We then exploit variation in laws...

After decades of convergence, the gender gap in employment outcomes has recently plateaued in many rich countries, despite the fact that women have increased their investment in human capital over this period. We propose a hypothesis to reconcile these two trends: that when they are making key...

Through the custom of guardianship, husbands typically have the final word on their wives' labor supply decisions in Saudi Arabia, a country with very low female labor force participation (FLFP). We provide incentivized evidence (both from an experimental sample in Riyadh and from a national...

It is the main purpose of this paper to examine in detail the pattern of fertility fluctuations in the United States since the Second World War and to define, with some precision, the questions these patterns raise for students of fertility behavior

Single women in the U.S. dominated the female labor force from 1870 to 1920. Data on the home life and working conditions of women in 1888 and 1907 enable the estimation of earnings functions. Work in the manufacturing sector for these women was task oriented and payment was frequently by the...