revolution for last century and this certainly has repercussions on mobility when we look when they break out the considerations between daughters and mothers we should revise the pessimistic outlook on social mobility that the characterized many societies such as the u.s. Society but if we look at the issue of social mobility in general then the increase of women employment as well as the increase in women's income can also lead us to a different direction in women families basically they tended there is to be a more relative among women the right reticle Rachel Fernandez is a professor at the New York University she is one of the most distinguished researcher on this issue her contribution is important to understand our social dynamics of the politics of women in economics of women what is most interesting is that just gender approach by Professor Fernandez took her to consider the different cultural variables in the general framework of the economic discourse developing models that are common in many studies different from the ones that she's going to share with us today what she's going to share with us today indeed he's very much focused on and they're very interesting hypotheses she talked about equity as well she's going to talk about wealth trying to answer the question was it economic growth or to ease the way for women to acquire certain rights and the top of this lecture is a bit provocative I find it I found it a bit irritating even that because it meant to be provocative as a matter of fact of Professor Fernandez is going to shows also that in her case this is the truth is this increase in right is it something that men yield to us or is it something that women banker Bankard for themselves so what is the powered stage it is the power of ownership so the study that Professor Fernandez is going to share with us refers to a special society that a u.s. Society in the 18th century but the issue of property right was not very difficult over in Europe because again women would lose their right to property as soon as they got married and they exchanged based on men judgments in that when man become fathers they basically change altitude when it comes to women owning very wealth so basically there's a change from patriarchy over to a more fatherly attitude so again it is always a decision of men whether to grant the women the possibility to own wealth so let us give us the floor professor Fernandez is going to give us this talk she's going to introduce the subject and the studies that she's carried out that are trying to some doctor though not probably very comprehensively and as is the habit with the first of all we're going to have some Q&A time over to you professor Fernandez thank you for that very nice introduction it was a very nice summary of my work and I have to tell you I'm a very modern woman I'm very conflicted at the moment I have been told that Roberta 15 minutes maximum my usual solution talk very quickly okay but I've been told by the translators that they will make my life miserable afterwards if I talk very quickly so I have to somehow stay in between okay so I will try to do the best I can but I might go a little bit either faster or slower than optimal okay in any case I am extremely happy to be here I would like to thank the organizers and Tito bode in particular he was very kind to invite me to the second festival that was held here many years ago when I spoke about culture and the role of women and I was glad to be able to fit this topic in which is on women's rights into the general topic of social mobility so thank you thank you again for the invitation okay so let me start let me start by giving you a little bit of a general motivation so we've seen huge expansion and women's rights this is not something that started today it's been happening for the last 200 or so years it's a process that's ongoing we know a lot of countries in which women don't have full rights and I cannot think of any country where women feel that yeah treat it just as equal to men in every single sphere so this is still something that it's very relevant for today and in every single country but still this process of women getting more and more rights is a question that we would like to ask well why did it occur you know what and in particular why do we tend to see this positive correlation between women getting more rights and the economy's growing development so to speak and when I say development I'm gonna speak quite broadly quite vaguely quite generally and I buy that I simply mean a process of growth and of declining fertility okay okay what I'm going to do is I'm going to study a fundamental right certainly from a point of view of an economist okay which is what I am which is property rights now sociologists may not consider property rights so important I don't know but for an economist these are fundamental and these are rights that women did not enjoy in full for centuries neither in Europe nor in the United States so in particular what I will study today is a historical project rather than something of mature modernity but it will certainly have bearing I think on development in general and also I hope just further shed further light on women's right so what are married women's property rights this is the rights that I'm going to look at well let's start with first maybe with a definition of what property rights are property rights are the legal rights to acquire to own sell transfer property to keep ones waiters to make contracts to bring lawsuits to you if you seek divorce be able to keep some of your marital assets and maybe some control over your children okay now both under Roman civil law which as you know governments of continental Europe and under English common law which is relevant to England and the United States once women married they lost these rights okay they are lost if not ownership then at least control over their physical property and upon divorce it was not true that children went to the mother children went to the father okay so these reforms happen at different points in time for different countries married women got these property rights but it the timing vary both in the United States across States and in Europe I am going to be basing my talk on the United States because I would like to show you empirical evidence and the United States is a particularly good place to show empirical evidence because there's so many states ok and there's so many states that are giving or granting these rights at different points in time and I can make use of the variation that exists in the United States to try to study this so in the US the the majority of the states based their marital laws on English common law and English common law is very romantic it says when you get married you become one person okay no longer two you become one person but which person is that it's not a new person it's your husband okay you become your husband okay little bit of a gender change but still you become your husband and it's under his wing under his protection what was called coverture okay under his cover that you perform everything under the nineteenth-century common law a married woman was bound by these rules and as I said before under-covered sure um husband controlled his wife's earnings if she worked his wife's property both real and personal married women were not allowed to enter into contracts about the permission of their husband and there were very good reasons for this legal reasons you are your husband so when you are entering into a contract you are actually making your husband legally responsible and that's not something we might want to do you know you might not want to have that okay so why did married women obtain property rights so the hypothesis that I am going to put forward has to do also with conflicting natures but this is not psychology this is gonna be economics so you can either be happy or sad about that I'm gonna tell you what the conflicts are and then we're gonna see how they get resolved so the conflict is between two identities of man man as a husband and man as a father now as a husband what we'll call a patriarchal system let's just call it that for sure a patriarchal system it's great I mean it kind of gives you your not only your own property but top rights over your your wife's property I mean you can't sell it there's all sorts of interesting details which I won't talk about giving the time constraints but it's not that you have full rights over it but you have a lot of rights and in particular you keep the rents okay so that's really good for them but as fathers they're really hurt by this system because insofar as their daughters are concerned who is benefiting well the sons and laws okay so that's bad for their daughters and they care about their daughters of course you could say look at it from the other point of view and say aha but they have sons as well and from the point of view of their sons they're benefiting because they don't carry necessarily about the daughters-in-law and the sons can you know control the property of the daughters and laws I'm gonna show you that this is not equivalent I'm going to show you that or try to argue for you at the very least that after a while parents are going to fathers in particular gonna get unhappy about this so what I'm going to explain further in a few minutes is that development think of increasing wealth decreasing fertility is going to exacerbate the tension between your happiness as a husband and your happiness as a father till eventually you decide no I actually prefer to give up my rights too but speak very basically exploit my wife why because that will stop my daughters from being exploited so you're going to give up those rights and the system is going to change okay I guess I should say from the beginning that despite the provocative question of were they these rights given or were they granted I think for this case it's gonna be fairly obvious that these rights are granted rather than sorry where these got rights won or where they grant it in this case they're going to be granted rather than one this is not a general lesson but this is an important lesson of saying when do the interests of men and women coincide and in this case they actually going to after a while coincide and what's good for women it's actually going to be in the benefit of men as well but I'm going to try to explain that so what's the mechanism and I'm going to go over it more than once okay I can't help it I have a very strong pedagogical streak so as fertility Falls or as the wealth increases both of those things make men richer okay be a few mouths to feed or if you have higher wealth for obviously richer and one of the things that you try to do is and try to increase the welfare of your children how do you do this you know there's many ways but one of the ways that you can think about doing this is increasing your bequests to children and increase that translators don't know bequest is what you leave your children okay now this primarily benefits the sons and not the daughters and why is this well because the husband's own and manage the wife's property and therefore they kind of get the surplus for marriage if you like it's not that marriage doesn't necessarily make the wife better off but what happens is that most the gains from higher wealth or lower fertility end up going to the husband rather than to the wife okay as development increases what I'm gonna argue is that this disparity between the welfare of your boys on the one hand and your girls on the other hand is going to increase so there's gonna be a bigger difference in the welfare and this is gonna make the father's unhappy and then they're going to get rid of the system and introduce a regime with more egalitarian rights the model is going to predict is that if you have lower fertility or if you have higher wealth you're going to do this reforms sooner and we're gonna look for that in the data and I'm going to show you whether to what extent that that is true it's also going to predict that systems that treat married women better and in particular those with a community property system that came from the Napoleonic Code those systems the wife is initially better she's going to be happier under those system but those systems are going to see reforms happen much later so it's a little bit paradoxical but systems that treat wives better we'll move to a system where women have more rights at a later time point in time everything else equal okay that is for the same fertility for the same wealth it will happen later okay now let me just very quickly try to situate this in the literature for you um so some rights obviously are one okay they're not granted and they're one either because there's a threat of revolt or a revolution or because leaders are deposed and a new system comes into play that's one literature another literature has looked at variety of issues in economics and in his in history and says rights are conceded because it makes those in power better off and what rights might those be well there's arguments that actually the abolitionist slavery happened this is contentious but the abolition of slavery happened because slaves were inefficient after a while it became more efficient to let them be free wage earners rather than try to feed them clothe them monitor them yourself okay there's arguments about why suffrage was extended that is why people got voting rights so have you ever looked at historical episodes you will see that voting rights are extended gradually in history first you know it's only a small elite of man who can have them then there's literacy and wealth requirements and there's you know property requirement and gradually these are you know expanded and expand it to everyone gets some including women okay they they're usually the last to get them okay so there's that type of argument there's universal education why don't we have a system of universal education now again there's arguments that say actually it benefits capitalists or entrepreneurs in a more neutral word maybe to have a workforce that is educated it's not very useful for you to educate your own workers because they go work somewhere else and you've paid for all their education but if the state comes in and educates all the workers at the same time well then you have an educated workforce so again education which sounds like a right that you might have fought for as a member of the working class say it might be a right that's actually given to workers because it makes capitalists better off it helps to solve a problem there's also the argument about a similar argument made about child labor laws for women's economic rights which is what we're looking at today both are two arguments have been made one very similar to slavery that it's inefficient okay and that simply says that this inefficiency it's inefficient to have a woman doing things and not keeping the rents from her activities and this inefficiency increases with capital or with wealth and that as wealth increases you have more of an incentive to get rid of this patriarchal system I'm gonna show that this doesn't really hold that very well in the data it also doesn't hold up very well historically because women did not work outside the house okay not if they were married not if they were white not in the United States at least they did not work there was probably less than 2% of women married women worked outside the house so it couldn't be because of these rents and then you might worry about housework etcetera but that's not a big deal DUP can Turtles have an argument that say actually the reason that women got these under these rights is because you know education became more important and men shortsighted lee in a way that can be made rigorous did not invest enough in boys or girls they did not put enough funding in for these education so by giving more rights to women if women care more about children women might help to cure this underinvestment problem because they will invest more in the education why because by let's just assume that by nature they care more about the children and the father does I'm gonna show you that this also doesn't work if I have time I may not and that it would be much easier to simply introduce mandatory education which is actually what the US did during this time period then to give up your rights why give up your property rights as a man why not just introduce mandatory education so the mechanism that I'm talking about today really relies on paternalism in the Latin sense of the word okay that is on father's caring okay about their children and for that issue it might be nice to ask do we have any other evidence that speaks to father's caring about their daughters in such a way that it influences their political behavior bogna Washington has a very nice paper where she looks at US Congress and she looks at the way that these congressmen voted on issues that have to do with women's welfare ok so there's many you could think of abortion you could think about Social Security that is more important for women and for men you can think of a variety of issues that women are going to matter for and what they do is that they show that a u.s. congressman is more likely to vote positively on these laws the greater is a proportion of his children that are girls okay so if you have four kids and three of them are girls you're more likely to vote in favor of these rights than if you have four kids and only one of them is a girl okay so that that's interesting evidence and that's actually very interesting because it's actually real political behavior in terms of political attitudes it's a very nice paper also by AUSA and part of e who use British survey data to and they find again that for constant family sizes you have three kids the more of those kids that are girls the more likely you are to have left-wing preferences whereby left wing will understand the Labour Party okay okay so let me go back to the basic theory I'm going to drag you through the theory for a little while there's not gonna be any equations I promise and I'll just give you a few diagrams and hopefully it will become clear what I'm trying to say okay so we are basically said okay parents care about the welfare of their kids as they get wealthier they try to make the children better off by giving them bequest but you might want to think about a patriarchal system almost as a method of taxation it makes it very hard to make your daughter better off you have to give them much more wealth to make them equally well off to a boy because again why because our husband's controlling the property so it's very hard to make your daughter better off that is relative to your son it's not that hard to make your son better off okay so as the economy grows and I'm gonna ask you to take this for granted I'm not going to show you the math behind this the welfare of both boys and girls is going to increase and I'm gonna say boys and girls men and women and wives and husbands kind of interchangeably okay and they're all playing that role but the welfare gap between the genders increases so what I draw on here is here is the amount of wealth that is in the household okay and as you can see as wealth increases the husband sorry that husband which is H here his happiness is going up with wealth the husband the happiness our a wife or of a girl is also going up so they're both going up but what I want you to see is a as wealth increases the gap the difference between the green line and the red line which is a happiness gap is increasing so although both are being made better off because they're richer boys are being made even better off than girls so that that gap between the two is increasing over time so we are not arguing that growth is not good for women growth is only good for men that's not the argument the argument is that it's differential okay it increases the happiness of both but it increases the happiness of men more than it increases the happiness of girls okay so I want you to keep those pictures in your mind don't worry I keep on showing you I'm only going to ask you to remember that h is a husband W is the wife or the woman and P is stands for patriarchy okay for the patriarchal system now this growing welfare gap across their children the gender of the children is going to dampen the welfare increase of fathers everything else equals they would prefer this gap not to increase and you might say well that's only true they care equally about their boys and their girls what about if they care really a lot more about their boys and they care about the girls we seem to sometimes think that right well that would still be true it would mean that they wouldn't want to certainly want the boys and the girls to be equally happy but still there's going to come a time when the welfare differential between the boys and the girls is sufficiently large that the husbands the men are on happy with this as well they they would love to change the system that will make their sons unhappy at that moment maybe but that would want to change the system ok so now I would like to do is to contrast this with a regime that allowed women to control their marital property and I just want to show you how that regime behaves for two seconds so this is the man's welfare under patriarchy this is a green line that we saw before on the x-axis we have wealth on the y-axis we have welfare it's increasing so this we've seen before here is a man's happiness under what I've called equal rights it's not really equal rights it just means that women control their property rights the the property when they get married so here is the happiness of a man still a man under equal rights well will mine want to switch to this red system rather than stay in the green system the patriarchal system so let me put both curves together and you know if you're an economist then you're going to take this point very seriously this is a point where the happiness under both regimes is equal but for any level of wealth that's to the right of k-star the men are actually better off under equal rights then they are underpaid sharky you can see the same is not true here here men prefer patriarchy to equal rights and then it flips over ok so well makes it flip over and as I well sorry what makes it flip here is the fact that men have become wealthier and that has made them more impatient visa visa systems let me just try to give you two seconds of intuition for this result so again for this result what is key is that growth is making if you lived in one regime equal rights or if you lived in patriarchy you would you know you would be be happier as your wealth increased no matter which regime you are under but in fact when you're very poor when you're very poor the difference between being under patriarchy and being under equal rights is small it's kind of strange it says that actually where we really care about being a patriarchal regime if you're a man this is not where you care about it because there's not that much of a difference in welfare it's here that there's a large difference in the welfare between being under patriarchy visa vie being under equal rights and why is that the case well because if you're under if you're poor it doesn't really help so much to control your wife's property she brings in an extra cow okay great okay but it's not it's not such a big deal it's as you get richer that the right to control your wife's property is a big deal to you so here the happiness gap between these two between being under patriarchy and being under equal rights is increasing after a while this inequality between your boys and girls starts to bother you more and more and more and more till you switch and that's when we as economists would predict the switch would happen sometime around k-star okay so now I want to argue the fertility argument so let me do that relatively quickly so let's look at let's just take fertility is fixed and let's look at men living under the patriarchal regime here and just propose it for whatever reason the fertility was lower okay instead of having say four kids each they all had three kids what would happen to their happiness that comes from wealth well the happiness that comes from wealth would go up because basically they feel richer there's fewer mouths to feed they can afford to consume more they can afford to bequeath more give more to their kids so they're happier under a regime when if for some reason fertility is lower okay what would happen if they lived under equal rights well similar things that'd be happier again because for for the same amount of capital a sari of wealth they would have fewer kids and therefore they would be able to bequeath and consume more let's put everything together I'm going to stand up let's put everything together maybe I speak like this okay when we put everything together and I know it's a maze of lines but the dashed lines are the new regime with lower fertility and the other lines are the lines with without the newer lower fertility as you can see what happens is that the reform is going to happen not at K star anymore but rather at K star prime okay that is it will happen at a lower level of wealth and why will it happen well because basically that conflict between the welfare of your boys and your girls happens at a lower value of wealth if you're wealthier for the same amount of wealth having fewer kids means you're you're basically wealthier I'm capita level okay the last exercise I'm going to do and then I'm going to show you some empirical evidence is to show you what happens with a more generous patriarchal regime so as I said the Napoleonic Code which did govern parts of u.s. states in fact eight of them treat it married women better in what sense in the sense that actually you know if the husband died they were left with half of the property instead of one-third of the property so it's a more generous regime than was a regime of of of common law that the UK Bay the English common law regime okay and I want us to use that to think what's gonna happen well regime will change happen sooner or will it happen later if you treat women married women better and as you can see this is under patriarchy and the dot the the line without any dashes is the usual line it shows you the happiness of men under patriarchy in the original regime and then the dashed line shows you a happiness of men under a patriarchal regime before no equal rights but it's a more generous one one that treats married women better and as you can see you know actually you know men are worse off at the beginning being generous to their wives because it means their daughters are treated better but they don't care so much about their daughters at this point they would prefer to be able to manage you know to not give so much to their own wives but later on it makes them better off what does that mean it's going to happen in terms of when the regime will change well let's look at the intersection of the happiness of men under equal rights with the intersection of the happiness of men under the new patriarchal regime and what you can see hopefully is that the the intersection goes from being here before to being on the right that is it means that reform to an equal rights regime will happen at a higher level of wealth and since it takes more time to get here it means that it's going to happen later so kind of paradoxically a regime that's nice to women makes women better off but it puts bones a day in which it will be even better off ok so you might think about parallels between that and a welfare state that gives women some let's say very generous rights say towards maybe staying how much time you can stay at home once you have a kid and maybe a very very generous regime is actually not the best regime in terms of if what you're thinking about is women getting equal rights maybe a regime that's tougher forces these changes sooner just don't need to keep in mind ok so now I want to talk a little bit about the empirics I'm just gonna check the time I'm gonna talk a little bit about the empirical work okay and just warn me when I when you think I'm close to my 50 okay let me see online so I'm gonna talk a little bit about the constructions of the key variables for those of you who are interested and if you're not just fall asleep for about 10 minutes and then and then I'll be done with this part okay so the property rights variable so that is when did women gets rights is a property rights variable from Gettys in Luke's and what they did is this is actually a very time-consuming task you have to go back to the legal treatises and find out when they were actually lost created that gave women management and control of their states that is their physical property and personal property and similarly for earnings those are two different things one is your earnings you aren't allowed to keep your earnings from working and two the other thing is your property so there are two separate things but they're obviously very related to one another it's your right to control your wealth if you'd like okay so they we're gonna construct this variable both which takes a value of one and I hope there's some econometricians here takes a value of one when both estate and earning rights have been granted and zero otherwise so that is it you know it lights up when both of them have it and otherwise no and I'm just gonna show you I I'm gonna assume most of you don't care about regressions but I'm gonna just show you a little bit of a picture that shows you when these rights were granted so what I'm plotting there is on the x-axis different US states and then the y-axis I'm plotting different dates and what it's showing you is the variation in time when different US states got granted both rights to women when they when they did that and you can see there's a lot of variation my study is between 1850 and 1920 by 1920 all states except for four of them have granted these rights Louisiana was a last state to grant these rights they granted them in 1980 okay but what it means to do this in 1980 in a very modern world is very different than one it means to do it here so we don't extend the analysis all the way out to 1980 the analysis ends in 1920 and as I said by 1920 all but four states have granted these rights to women okay the first year that you see there is Massachusetts in 1846 another way maybe better for all of you I'll give me you probably don't know all of these symbols abbreviations for states it's just to show you a map of the US so let me do that okay here's a map of the United States and the darker ones are the ones that did it for sooner soonest and as you can see have breakdowns and then the lightest ones are the ones that did at last okay and you see there's quite a lot of variation you know it's sooner maybe in the in the Northeast but there's quite a lot of variation across US states as to when this happens which is why this is a the US as a good laboratory for thinking about this issue it's not that I'm particularly us-centric it's it's really as a good lab for this okay the other variable I need to talk to you about is fertility I there's there's wealth wealth is gonna be measured by luckily other people at the state level so I'm gonna take their measures of wealth but the other measure I have to take is fertility now we're talking about a time period that might be hard for you to imagine we're for the infant mortality or children's mortality up to age 10 was near thirty five percent at the beginning of this period okay so try to imagine that one in every thirty third child dying before the age of ten so what armed with the theory that I told you does not care about the child who does not make it to marriage it cares about the girl that gets to be a wife because that's the girls whose interest you're trying to protect from her husband okay so really I don't care about how many children people have done I care about how many children survived to you know a reasonable age signs agents they could get married and that's actually good for me because it's impossible to find statistics from the eighteen fifty they ask people how many children they have instead we have to do what development economists often do or demographers do which is to look at the ratio of children to the ratio of women okay and that's what we're going to be doing I'm going to be looking at children that I think have a reasonable chance of making it to the age of marriage ten is not a good age to get married my daughter over their age children from the age of 10 to 19 and I'm gonna be looking at women ages 20 to 39 and I'm just gonna call this variable for till eighty ten and the ten is simply to remind us that I'm not looking at children under the age of ten okay I'm also only looking at whites why because white men are the ones who have power in the United States at this moment in time if they change the law so as to make their make their daughters better off it's white men who changed the laws to make their white daughter's better off it's not something that's happening between whites and blacks so I don't care about what is happening to the fertility of blocks or the wealth of box and during a large time period here they're going to part of this time period here they're still gonna be slaves just to give you a little bit of a picture again for the economists and the audience I mean this is what that variable looks like I bought it how it evolves mean the black line is how it evolves over time and for any decade I've plotted the variation that exists across States okay so as you can see there's a great deal of variation so you'd like you know the variation of fertility ten goes between three at the max to somewhere below below 1.5 at the men and that's for 1850 and then you know these things are standard deviations and I'm just plotting the mean for you okay that's not the other only source of variation that exists across States so right now we have fertility might vary is varying across states I'm not showing you wealth that wealth is also varying across states states vary in other important ways that we need to take into account some states are not independent states during at least parts of these periods they belong to territories territories make their laws potentially in ways that are different than independent states so we're going to control for territorial status either differences across states have to do with our legal system some states are not just common law but they have equity courts I don't know if you had things like this in Italy at my feeling as you probably did equity courts were something that allowed basically allowed wealthier individuals to try to contract around the rigidities of common law so in particular you might be able to protect a bit the property of your daughter by putting her uncle in charge of it say okay so it wasn't a way of giving women rights and your uncle might turn out to be not a very nice guy okay but it was a way at least of affording a bit greater protection and then more important for our theory is that some states eight of them have community property law they still do in the United States by the way these are were inherited from the Spanish Civil Law or from the Napoleon Napoli onek code and I explained a little bit the difference has to do with what the widow gets where you're gonna think of states that are under community property law as being the more generous patriarchal regime that we talked about before states that treat married women better but that in the end might end up postponing reforms okay okay this horrible slide is just telling you what I'm doing so this slide is just telling you that I am going to be looking at the dependent variable that is both when did they get these rights and I'm going to be controlling for a whole series of characteristics that I'm interested in I'm going to be looking at fertility I'm going to be looking at wealth at the state level and I'm going to be doing it decade by decade I'm not going to be able to look year by year which is fine because we wouldn't believe that variation on fertility I'm going to look at decade averages because that's the data that we have we have data from the US census which comes out every ten years and therefore allows us to follow the evolution of these variables okay so here I just let me just go straight to the main result so next time I'm getting a microphone on my dress okay so here I just want to show you here the dependent variable is both okay so when do they get both rights and what I want to show you and you know teacher you can tell me if how much detail should go into these things I a hint would be appreciate it okay this is just I don't want to show you then I'm just gonna be very broad this is negative and significant it means that we find that states with lower fertility okay I go with this until you get it fixed okay so state with this just tells you that states with lower with higher fertility saw these reforms happen later that's what that negative sign means there's no real effect of wealth it seems to be bad to be a territory and community systems the ones that are nice to women are much less likely to grant these rights Keter everything else equal okay there's 60 something percent less likely to grant these rights so now I want to do something which I probably shouldn't do but I'm gonna do it very quickly therefore which is to try to introduce state fixed effects what a state fixed effects means state fixed effects is that you know there's characteristics that are varying across states you're used all the variation now I only want to use a variation that comes within a state so it's like saying I don't care about fertility differences say between New York and Massachusetts I'm going to follow the fertility and the wealth changes in Massachusetts I'm going to follow those of New York I'm controlling for the state and it's that variation that has to identify things here is a map which I thought might be instructive of what the United States look like in 1850 which is the beginning of the sample it changes over time the big things are independent states and they kind of look more or less the way they look today basically all certainly all of the Northeast looks exactly the way and as you see those big things over there those are territories those contain various faiths and I won't embarrass my daughter by trying to name the states that are in each block because I won't get it right okay and then she'll have to apologize for me okay so when we when we when we introduce these these are called for economist State State fixed effects or state dummies when we introduced these dummies let's look at this one our main variable of interest is fertility it's still negative and significant being a territory still bad there's no effective communities and that's kind of puzzling and then you kind of have to remember that when you control four states the only way to identify your legal system is if you switch legal systems and only three legal systems are switching so it's very hard to to identify it so one thing we can do is instead of identical four states we can introduce regional dummies so you can think about the map of the United States and the United States has nine regions I'm not going to show them to you right now it has nine regions so instead of controlling for what state you're in I can control for what region your state is in and ask what happens and when you do that you then once again see the negative effect of fertility see the negative effect of being a community state there's no effect by the way of wealth and this is a very consistent result my model actually does not predict that when wealth increases you automatically want to become more in favor of women having more rights in fact as I argued it's the effect is that first negative when you're really poor you don't care about women's rights not women either having them or not having them there's not much utility difference it's only when you become someone medium ly rich those are the countries those are the places in time that we expect people to be most patriarchal not when they're very rich and not when they're very poor we don't find either you for those of you know when we control for quadratic we don't find any effects of wealth either Oh I have five more minutes five minutes so let me take you I'm gonna skip the endogenous fertility part even though I know that you have questions about it but maybe you will ask me and then I will show it at that point okay so I'm gonna skip this part unfortunately and instead of the five minutes I have left I'm gonna do something which I think we should all do as scholars which is to think about alternative hypotheses that could explain what we see so to recap what we see we see this very clear robust correlation that says lower fertility means you have you give these rights sooner and we want to worry about why it is you have lower fertility but we won't do it now we'll do it when she asked the question okay you have a clear job of about that okay then the other robust implication that we found in the data was you know if you're a community state you had Napoleonic law you had Spanish law those states were more generous those states give rights later everything else equal they give rights letter later okay so we I want to now talk about other possible hypothesis one possible hypothesis that you might have is that maybe it has something to do with schooling maybe those states where fertility was lower had more schooling for women and maybe women were more educated in those states were more pushing for the rights to manage their own property that could be one hypothesis you might have so I let me just take care of that by hypothesis there's many ways I can do it I can look at when compulsory schooling was introduced in the state and that has no effect I can look at how much schooling girls have that has no effect I can look at how much schooling boys have that has no effect the compulsory school a year at which of schooling actually has an effect that's significant but it goes in the wrong direction it says the sooner you introduce compulsory schooling the later was a reform so schooling doesn't seem to be what it's about it's not because of schooling that this happened another alternative hypothesis that you might have is that maybe some places have more cities and these rights are more important maybe once you live in a city and there's more uses in which to put your property than an agricultural state say so one thing we can do is to control for the fraction of the population that lives in cities of a decent size okay so maybe over 25,000 people or something like that let's control for that fraction and when we do nothing happens to our results and that variable is not important another possibility that people have advanced from why women got rights at least in the United States has to do with scarcity of women okay and this is used a lot sometimes to think about what might happen later on in China or India women are scarce okay well in the United States and many in some of the states particularly the West women were scarce because you know it tended to be male settlers that moved West first and then the women would follow and one way you might want to make your state more attractive is to pass laws that are better for what married women that would be one thing to do so we can look at male this is a a proportion of the population that is male and ask whether the proportion of the population of this male does anything to change the positive probability of women's rights and as we see it doesn't and nothing changes for fertility 10 and then lastly we might say well maybe we're not looking deeply enough okay let's look at women's suffrage most of us think that suffrage is women's voting women getting voting rights that's something that happened in the United States also at different points in time much more compressed and on the whole later than married women properties rights okay well is there any relationship between when women got suffrage when they got voting rights in other words in a state and when they got these property rights and the your answer is no there is no relationship has no predictive value so whatever mechanism is leading women to have voting rights it doesn't seem to be related to the mechanism the reasons of deep causes for women getting property rights okay there doesn't seem to be a relationship between the two I'm going to conclude now hopefully within my time and just say well the theory that I put up predicted that fertility would at lowering fertility would hastened the day in which women got these rights because men saw it in their interest to give it to them a legal regime that was more favorable to women in fact would make these rights be postponed because a man would not feel this contradiction between being a father and being a husband till much later on and lastly it predicted also that enough capital accumulation would actually lead to reform so enough wealth would lead to reform but actually when you look at the data you tend not to find any sort of relationship mind predicted a an inverse a u-shaped relationship here you tend not to find a relationship and it might have to do with the other theme of this conference which is income distribution so I've been talking about men as though all men are the same and of course all men are not the same they differ in many ways and one ways that the differ was in how much wealth they had and in fact that pictures that I showed to you about wealth and the way you feel about things goes like this well it means that actually poor men might be in favor of women having equal rights over they couldn't care very much Richmond might really want women to have equal rights and men in the middle they might be the ones who really against right so it has a lot to do with a distribution of off in a society and then how do we map that distribution of wealth to distribution of power who makes the laws etc and that's a very deep and interesting question which I don't have that much to say about right now okay anyway thank you very much for being such a patient and good audience Thank You professor Fernandez thank you because you have to be fast but you have been very clear anyway so thank you for this I would say that we collect two three questions and then you can answer them is there anybody wishing to ask questions let's hope that the microphone works in which language asks lady you have the floor in sorry and then if Poorman are in favor tendentially to women why are the majority of poor societies patriarchy Hill now why is it served that in Asia and Africa we do not have systems that favor women in general and then fertility seems to be a proxy for female emancipation is it really so because I see a statistical and conceptual issue there because what if fertility is low it is normally because women are emancipated so these are the two points that I wanted to raise early on you dismissed the idea that activism might be responsible for the changes you're talking about would it be possible to map the the frequency and the occurrence of activist activities women's rights conventions etc in different locations and test that okay thank you for both questions the the challenge of developed country developing countries is a very interesting one and important precisely to take care of the fact that fertility is endogenous and may respond to a lot of things one of the things I do is to say instead of looking at fertility let me look at a proxy for fertility which is infant mortality so and what I do is I show that the places where infant mortality was largest Keter is everything else equal where they children tended to die more those places at any given year any given decade tended to have smaller families and in fact it's it there that we see women's rights women's property rights comes sooner so it's not it's not necessarily the part of it that women are all women are actually over time having fewer and fewer kids here but in some states at any moment in time infant mortality is larger and therefore there's actually fewer surviving children that's what we can show there's fewer surviving children those places with fewer surviving children see it happen sooner and it's hard to believe that that is coming because of women's power it's coming because of infant mortality rather than women's power furthermore if we thought that it was a mechanism like the one you are alluding to that it has to do with women having more emancipation and that's why they're having fewer children then we have to ask but why is it that that why is it that there's no relationship between women's of voting rights and women's property rights and we do not see a relationship in the data some states give voting rights early on but they take a long time to give property rights so it seems to be two different things as for as for what's happening with developing countries you're right we've seen that fertility is falling in those countries it's still very high in some of them but overall that's been falling I would say probably women have more rights than they used to in those countries but it's not enough and it is something that different groups are pushing ok so like I was talking to an economist the other day and they were telling me the Grameen Bank one of the things that it did was to in fact not only give money for children sorry you not only give money for women in order to develop property but also to push for reforms they would say to the government they would push for reforms that gave women property rights and so it's been seen as a big big deal and and in that context in terms of mapping female activism I didn't try to do that I would love to I would have that data set as far as I know doesn't exist so one would have to go to the data and try to figure it out but it's precisely the fact that for women's voting rights we know of activities even bomb-throwing activities by anarchists okay during that time period those were big big rights they were really fighting for those rights you see them come up time and time again in meetings of women you do not see the same thing about women's property rights now maybe this is a concern maybe we think well why weren't they concerned more about their property rights and one should think about why but this was not something they thought for the way they fought for voting okay she's a nice bring the man are there additional questions none so I would say that we can close here we thank professor Fernandez very much and enjoy the rest of the evening to all of you yeah it also makes sense that they would first not political I think you change you