The authors examine how domestic violence may be used as a bargaining instrument, to extract larger dowries from a spouse's family. The phrase"dowry violence"refers not to the paid at the time of the wedding, but to additional payments demanded by the groom's family after the marriage. The...

Sex ratios at birth rose sharply in the South Caucasus countries after 1991, but recent data indicate that this trend is turning. What caused this rise, and what can be done to accelerate its normalization? Traditional kinship systems in the region are similar to those of other settings with...

Do women weather economic shocks differently than men? The evidence shows this to be the case, especially in low-income countries. The first-round impacts of economic crises on women's employment should be particularly salient in the current downturn, since women have increased their...

Violent conflict, a pervasive feature of the recent global landscape, has lasting impacts on human capital, and these impacts are seldom gender neutral. Death and destruction alter the structure and dynamics of households, including their demographic profiles and traditional gender roles. To...

This paper is a critical review of the literature on the issue of how male behavior affects female outcomes in the promotion of gender equality. It employs the family as the main unit of analysis because a large part of gender interactions occurs within this institution. This survey first...

This paper updates and extends the Docquier-Marfouk data set on inter-national migration by educational attainment. The authors use new sources, homogenize definitions of what a migrant is, and compute gender-disaggregated indicators of the brain drain. Emigration stocks and rates are provided...

Bringing together history and economics, this paper presents a historical and processual understanding of women's economic marginalization in Sub-Saharan Africa from the pre-colonial period to the end of colonial rule. It is not that women have not been economically active or productive; it is...

Using a recently compiled dataset on migration and remittances in Ghana, this paper estimates the determinants of an individual’s likelihood to be an internal migrant and the relationship between internal migration and welfare. The analysis finds that the likelihood to migrate is determined by...

This paper aims to investigate empirically how international migration and remittances in Indonesia, particularly female migration, affect child outcomes and labor supply behavior in sending households. The authors analyze the Indonesia Family Life Survey data set and apply an instrumental...

This paper assesses the impact of work-related migration by males on the labor market behavior of females in Nepal. Using data from the 2004 Nepal household survey, the authors apply the Instrumental Variable Full Information Maximum Likelihood method to account for unobserved factors that could...