Can effective policy implementation change political selection by inducing voters to prioritize leader competence over other traits, such as gender? We answer this question by examining the impact of a successful school-expansion program on the likelihood of women being elected to state...

Cultural norms play a pivotal role in shaping how societies respond to crises. This study examines the causal effect of ethnic-specific gender norms on gender-biased mortality during resource shocks. Studying the 1891-1892 Russian famine, we compare cohorts born before and after the famine in...

Blended finance programs combine public and private funding to ease credit constraints of specific firm segments. While rapidly gaining popularity, little evidence exists on their economic impact. To address this gap, we match credit registry data with firm-level tax records to trace out the...

We study the dynamics between intra-household bargaining and parental time-intensive investments in children. We combine novel measures of verbal investments and beliefs about the returns to investment for both parents with hyper-local variation in female bargaining power stemming from...

In the last decades, the US has seen narrowing gender employment, wage, and education gaps. The labor market has also faced a shift from physical (“brawn”) to intellectual (“brain”) skill requirements. I rationalize this in a general equilibrium model using two key assumptions: (1) brain...