Legalization of abortion in the 1970s represents a major cultural change: it gives women a higher degree of freedom to directly control their fertility, allowing them to ultimately decide upon children without man's consent and to decrease uncertainty in their expected labor market returns. This...

When valuing risky prospects, people tend to overweight small probabilities and to underweight large probabilities. Nonlinear probability weighting has proven to be a robust empirical phenomenon and has been integrated in decision models, such as cumulative prospect theory. Based on a laboratory...

Why has the expansion of women's economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question, focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and...

This paper evaluates the impacts of increasing female representation in Bolivian municipal councils on public policy choices and welfare outcomes. By combining detailed administrative panel data on municipal expenditures and revenues together with electoral data, an innovative regression...

Violence has a striking gender pattern. Men are more likely to be attacked by a stranger, while women experience violence mostly from their partners. This paper estimates the costs of violence against women in terms of intangible outcomes, such as women’s reproductive health, labor supply, and...

Violence against women (VAW) is only beginning to be recognized as a major societal problem within and across Asia. This is evidenced by the high level of self-reporting by men and women of sexual violence and domestic violence in recent UN surveys; the extremely low conviction rates for these...