TY  - JOUR
AU  - Doepke,Matthias
AU  - Tertilt,Michèle
TI  - Women's Liberation: What's in It for Men?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13919
PY  - 2008
Y2  - April 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13919
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13919.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Matthias Doepke
Northwestern University
Department of Economics
2001 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208
Tel: 847-491-8207
E-Mail: doepke@northwestern.edu

Michèle Tertilt
Department of Economics
University of Mannheim
L7, 3-5
68131 Mannheim
Germany
Tel: +49-621-181-1902
E-Mail: tertilt@uni-mannheim.de
AB  - The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic improvements in the legal rights of married women. Given that these changes took place long before women gained the right to vote, they amounted to a voluntary renouncement of power by men. In this paper, we investigate men's incentives for sharing power with women. In our model, women's legal rights set the marital bargaining power of husbands and wives. We show that men face a tradeoff between the rights they want for their own wives (namely none) and the rights of other women in the economy. Men prefer other men's wives to have rights because men care about their own daughters and because an expansion of women's rights increases educational investments in children. We show that men may agree to relinquish some of their power once technological change increases the importance of human capital. We corroborate our argument with historical evidence on the expansion of women's rights in England and the United States.
ER  -