Text

theses

This dissertation is concerned with how social norms contribute to gender inequality. In particular, I examine how attitudes toward gender roles affect women’s labor outcomes and what factors determine these roles. I also investigate if there are pecuniary motives behind “bride kidnaping marriages”, a contentious “traditional” practice in Kyrgyzstan that often restricts women’s ability to choose mates. Lastly, I conduct an experiment designed to elicit information about how individuals make investment decisions without binding contacts in a modified “trust (or investment) game”. The experiment is designed to simulate life situations, like potential moral hazard problems related to intergenerational transfers.
In chapter 2, I focus on measuring the effect of conservative attitudes on female labor force outcomes. The literature measures the effects of gender role attitudes using indices that do not reveal whether a woman is conservative or liberal with respect to attitudes toward gender roles by local norms. I conjecture that local norms matter. Accordingly, I employ a novel approach to determining if a woman is conservative or not, which incorporates both her attitudes toward gender roles and the perception by men in her community of what women’s roles should be. I estimate and compare results from bivariate and switching probit models which assume that being a conservative woman is endogenous with respect to female labor market decisions. I also use a semiparametric approach to circumvent the necessity of relying on strong distributional assumptions when using comparable baseline parametric models. Using a rich data set from a country in Central Asia, semiparametric methods predict conservative females will reduce labor force attachment by 8.8 percentage points, a significantly lower effect in magnitude than the one yielded by parametric models. From a policy perspective, my analysis reveals that university level education is 50 percent more effective in terms of increasing the labor force participation of conservative women when compared to secondary technical education. I also find that mothers with university degrees, but not technical degrees, pass egalitarian gender attitudes to their daughters, fostering wider acceptance of women’s employment and promoting convergence of gender gaps in labor force participation.
In Chapter 3, I investigate if there are pecuniary motives associated with a ‘traditional’ way of getting married in Kyrgyzstan, called ‘Ala Kachuu’ and translated as ‘catch and run’ or ‘bride kidnapping’? I examine if bride kidnapping marriages (BKMs) are associated with the level of wedding costs in Kyrgyzstan. Despite evidence that a wedding’s cost may be twice per capita GDP, the current literature does not consider the costs associated with wedding festivities as a major factor explaining bride kidnapping. Using a rich data set from Kyrgyzstan, I find that BKMs lead to a 42 percent reduction in wedding costs compared to conventional marriages. A falsification test, addressing potential endogeneity concerns, confirms the results are not driven by omitted variable bias or selection issues.
In Chapter 4, I conduct an experiment designed to elicit information about how individuals choose amounts to invest and pay back in the presence of the investor’s ability to reward the counterpart at no cost to the investor in the final stage of the experiment. The experiment is an extension of a conventional “trust (or investment) game”. It involves sequential exchanges of money without the ability of making enforceable agreements between participants, which suggests that the Subgame Perfect Nash Equilibrium is to send zero amount of investment. I find that the higher the investor’s ability to “reward” the recipient in the final stage, which acts as a treatment, the greater is the level of investment in the first stage. In addition, higher values of treatment also lead to: i) more efficient outcomes in terms of total surplus generated and ii) greater return on investment. Lastly, I provide evidence that the investor may be driven both by self- and other-regarding (equity-based) preferences. However, the investors’ behavior is not consistent with altruistic motives. The experiment bears resemblance to real life situations such as intergenerational transfers characterized by an exchange motive and labor migrant’s transfers of remittances explained by investment motives.

ETD_10199

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-kbc5-qn06

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.