Essays on gender and household economics

Frigo, Annalisa
(2021)

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Authors
  • Frigo, AnnalisaUCLouvain
    author
Supervisors
De la Croix, David
 ;
Mariani, Fabio
Abstract
This doctoral thesis is concerned with the incentives and mechanisms that drive family transformations and gender norms. In order to explore the decisions made within the household and their consequences at more aggregate levels, the guiding theme follows the life-cycle of the family and features the investment in the human capital of children along three main dimensions: (i) a backward-looking one, on the roots of gender norms; (ii) a dynamic one, on the role played by personal incentives and constraints on childbearing, when the latter is modelled as a durable good; (iii) a more societal one, on the well-being of children in one's country and the migration intentions of (prospective) parents. In more details, in Chapter 1, we shed light on the deep origins of gender norms, rooted into the availability of viable options besides marrying for medieval nubile girls. Exploiting a rich set of historical data, we provide robust evidence of a long-lasting cultural legacy: Belgian beguinages —founded between 1207 and 1500— were instrumental in generating higher local levels of gender equality in literacy in 1866. In Chapter 2, the focus shifts to the importance of multiple kinds of constraints in the fertility decisions of present-day (would-be) parents. This study estimates a life-cycle model of optimal fertility behaviour to reproduce and interpret the observed stylised facts of Belgian and French couples. Featuring the depreciation of reproductive capital as additional factor in the dynamic framework, this contribution provides a novel tool to discuss the timing and quantity of births in counterfactual scenarios. In Chapter 3, we study the role of child well-being in the migratory choice of young adults. Taking advantage of a large cross-section survey, the Gallup World Poll, covering Latin American and Caribbean countries between 2009 and 2015, we single out the relevance of parental perceptions towards the conditions of children as an important migration push factor, aside from traditional individual covariates.
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Frigo, A. (2021). Essays on gender and household economics. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/109342