On the Economic Origins of Concerns over Women's Chastity

Abstract : This paper studies the origins and function of customs that are manifestations of concern over women's chastity, such as a particularly invasive form of female genital cutting, restrictions on women’s freedom of mobility, and norms about their sexual behavior. The analysis tests the anthropological theory that a particular form of pre-industrial subsistence – pastoralism – favored the adoption of such customs. Pastoralism was characterized by heightened paternity uncertainty due to frequent and often extended periods of male absence from the settlement, implying larger payoffs to imposing restrictions on women’s sexuality. Using within-country variation across 500,000 women in 34 countries, the paper shows that women from historically more pastoral societies (i) are significantly more likely to have undergone infibulation, the most invasive form of female genital cutting; (ii) adhere to more restrictive norms about women’s promiscuity; (iii) are more restricted in their freedom of mobility. Instrumental variable estimations that make use of the ecological determinants of pastoralism support a causal interpretation of the results. The paper further shows that the mechanism behind these patterns is indeed male absence, rather than male dominance, per se, or historical economic development.

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Women's Position in Ancestral Societies and Female Hiv: the Long-term Effect of Matrilineality in Sub-saharan Africa

Abstract : Can contemporary female HIV rates be traced back to women’s position in ancestral societies ? In matrilineal kinship organizations, lineage and inheritance are traced through female members and children integrate the kin group of their mother rather than their father. Ethnographic accounts suggest that in matrilineal kinship structures, women benefit from greater autonomy and spousal cooperation is reduced. I test the hypothesis that, by affecting women’s sexual and contraceptive behaviours, ancestral matrilineality has a causal impact on the prevalence of female HIV. Using variation in ethnic groups’ ancestral kinship organizations within Sub-Saharan African countries, I find that females originating from ancestrally matrilineal ethnic groups are today more likely to be infected by HIV. This finding is robust to the inclusion of subnational fixed effects, as well as a large set of cultural, historical, geographical, and environmental factors. I find consistent results using a number of alternative estimation strategies, including a geographic regression discontinuity design at ethnic boundaries and an instrumental variable strategy. Matrilineal females’ riskier sexual and contraceptive behaviours constitute the main explanatory mechanisms. These results call for policies moving beyond the “one-size-fits-all” strategy and taking local cultural contexts into account.

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The Economics of Gender-specific Minimum-wage Legislation

Abstract : During the 1910s, twelve U.S. states passed and implemented the country’s first minimum-wage laws. They covered only female employees, often in a subset of industries. We study the impact of this regulation using full-count Census data. Our identification strategy compares county-industry trends in county-pairs that straddle state borders. We find that female employment decreased by at least 3.1% at the county-industry level. Across counties, we find that the own-wage elasticity of labor demand varies from around –1.6 to 0.8 as a function of the local cross-industry concentration. Affected female workers switch industries or drop out of the labor force. The latter channel is driven exclusively by married women. We document a rise in male labor demand, and we investigate the channels of substitution between men and women. While on average men and women are gross substitutes, we find evidence that the margin of substitution is driven by the replacement of women in low-rank occupations with men in middle- or high-rank occupations

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