WiP seminar: Giovanni Prarolo

Abstract

Gender inequality is a widespread and persistent phenomenon. In a simple model of fertility choices and family formation we show that an overlooked biological difference across genders, specifically women's reduced fertility in older age, can alone explain the emergence of unequal power sharing within the family, even in a context of perfect gender equality in the labor market, childbearing costs, social norms, etc. We show how this mechanism interacts with other socioeconomic characteristics and provide examples of gender parity policies that exacerbate or downsize the effects of such mechanism.