The concentration of women in the teaching profession is widely noted and generally attributed to gender differences in preferences and social roles. Further, gender segregation exists within this profession – women make up almost all of the primary and pre-primary teaching cohorts, while men...

Since 2004 six states plus Washington, DC have implemented laws that provide paid leave benefits to workers caring for family members who have a disability or serious medical condition. Focusing on the most established state programs - California and New Jersey - this paper investigates whether...

In many high-income economies, the recession caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in unprecedented declines in women's employment. We examine how the forces that underlie this observation play out in developing countries, with a specific focus on Nigeria, the most populous country in...

In this paper, we evaluate the effects of free pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs on the labor force participation (LFP) of mothers. We use variation in pre-K rules across all US states, including income eligibility requirements in some states. To estimate the causal effects of access to pre-K on...

Bertrand, Kamenica and Pan (2015) document that in the U.S. there is a sharp discontinuity to the right of 1/2 in the distribution of households according to the share of income earned by the wife, which they attribute to the existence of a gender identity norm postulating that a wife should...

This study seeks to determine the effect on the gender employment gap and women's employment of the extension of maternity leave from four months to six months in Viet Nam's 2012 Labor Code. To identify this effect, labour market outcomes of groups of women and men are compared. We use the...

The stagnancy of women's workforce participation in urban India is alarming and puzzling, considering the pace of economic development experienced in the previous decade. We investigate the extent to which the low workforce participation of women can be explained by growing instances of...

Despite broad progress in closing many dimensions of the gender gap around the globe, recent research has shown that traditional gender roles can still exert a large influence on female labor force participation, even in developed economies. This paper empirically analyzes the role of culture in...

Bertrand et al. (2015) show that among married couples in the US, the distribution of the share of the household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp drop just to the right of .50. They argue that this drop is consistent with a social norm prescribing that a man should earn more than his...

Despite broad progress in closing many dimensions of the gender gap around the globe, recent research has shown that traditional gender roles can still exert a large influence on female labor force participation, even in developed economies. This paper empirically analyzes the role of culture in...