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It's Raining Men! Hallelujah?

Author

Listed:
  • Pauline Grosjean

    (School of Economics, Australian School of Business, the University of New South Wales)

  • Rose Khattar

    (School of Economics, Australian School of Business, the University of New South Wales)

Abstract
We document the implications of missing women in the short and long run. We exploit a natural historical experiment, which sent large numbers of male convicts and far fewer female convicts to Australia in the 18th and 19th century. In areas with higher gender imbalance, women historically married more, worked less, and were less likely to occupy high-rank occupations. Today, people living in those areas have more conservative attitudes towards women working and women are still less likely to have high-ranking occupations. We document the role of vertical cultural transmission and of homogamy in the marriage market in sustaining cultural persistence. Conservative gender norms may have been beneficial historically, but are no longer necessarily so. Historical gender imbalance is associated with an aggregate income loss estimated at $800 per year, per person. Our results are robust to a wide array of geographic, historical and present-day controls, including migration and state fixed effects, and to instrumenting the overall sex ratio by the sex ratio among convicts.

Suggested Citation

  • Pauline Grosjean & Rose Khattar, 2014. "It's Raining Men! Hallelujah?," Discussion Papers 2014-29, School of Economics, The University of New South Wales.
    • Handle: RePEc:swe:wpaper:2014-29
    as

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    File URL: http://research.economics.unsw.edu.au/RePEc/papers/2014-29.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Australia: blokey from the get-go
      by Nicholas Gruen in Club Troppo on 2014-07-07 19:46:42
    2. Gender, culture & economism
      by chris dillow in Stumbling and Mumbling on 2014-07-04 17:54:26
    3. Created by history
      by chris in Stumbling and Mumbling on 2015-02-11 23:05:10

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Culture; gender roles; sex ratio; natural experiment; Australia;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being
    • N37 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - Africa; Oceania
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • Z33 - Other Special Topics - - Tourism Economics - - - Marketing and Finance

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