[lbo-talk] economists think about women's liberation

Max B. Sawicky sawicky at verizon.net
Mon Apr 28 19:22:14 PDT 2008


One of the more embarrassing abstracts I have seen.

(CEPR not to be confused with Dean Baker's shop of the same name in D.C.)

Doug Henwood wrote:
> "Women's Liberation: What's in it for Men?"
>
>
>
> NBER Working Paper No. W13919
>
>
> MATTHIAS DOEPKE, Northwestern University, Department of Economics,
> University of California, Los Angeles - Department of Economics,
> Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), National Bureau of
> Economic Research (NBER), Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
> Email: doepke at econ.ucla.edu
> MICHELE TERTILT, Stanford University - Department of Economics
> Email: tertilt at stanford.edu
>
>
>
> The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic improvements in the legal
> rights of married women. Given that these changes took place long
> before women gained the right to vote, they amounted to a voluntary
> renouncement of power by men. In this paper, we investigate men's
> incentives for sharing power with women. In our model, women's legal
> rights set the marital bargaining power of husbands and wives. We
> show that men face a tradeoff between the rights they want for their
> own wives (namely none) and the rights of other women in the economy.
> Men prefer other men's wives to have rights because men care about
> their own daughters and because an expansion of women's rights
> increases educational investments in children. We show that men may
> agree to relinquish some of their power once technological change
> increases the importance of human capital. We corroborate our
> argument with historical evidence on the expansion of women's rights
> in England and the United States.
>
>
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