Michele Tertilt is an Assistant Professor in Stanford University's Department of Economics.
Women's rights appear to be highly related to economic development. This seems to be true both across countries, where women have most rights in the richest countries,
and in time series data: women have slowly improved their legal position in parallel with fast improvements in the standard of living. In her research Tertilt investigates this link from an economic perspective.
Specifically, she analyzes the incentives for men to share power with women. She shows that as education becomes more important, men may want to voluntarily
relinquish some power to women. The reason is that men face a trade-off between how they would ideally treat their own wives and how they want other women to be treated.
One channel is that while men might want little rights for their own wives, they may actually care about their daughters and hence want their daughters to have
a better bargaining position with future husbands. A second channel Tertilt investigates is that a wife's education is important for producing high quality children. Then, a husband might want to give his wife rights to provide better incentives for her father to invest into his wife's schooling (prior to marriage).
The analysis is based on several asymmetries between men and women: women are more altruistic towards all children than men, women care relatively more about girls than men, and women are more important for children's education than men. In her work, Tertilt investigates which of these asymmetries are most important.
U.S. cross-state data is used to empirically verify the model's predictions. Tertilt shows that states with more education, higher GDP per capita, and lower fertility extended suffrage and other rights to women earlier than states with a lower average education, lower GDP and higher fertility.
Last seminar in the 2005-06 Gender Forum series.