Jump to navigation. To attend the conference, please contact the secretariat Christelle Fotso Tatchum. This thesis contains three essays studying the various ways in which outcomes are shaped by the interaction of economic factors, social norms, and institutional constraints, with a focus on women. In the first chapter, I study the earnings effects of motherhood, and how they interact with women's sexual orientation. Motherhood carries an earnings penalty for women that is both well known and persistent; however, the share attributable to differences in human capital or productivity has decreased, while the unexplained share has increased over the decades.
This has led to a renewed focus on household labor specialization, and the part played by gendered norms in determining it. Lesbian couples are not subject to the same social norms about housework that straight couples are, and indeed, preliminary evidence seemed to suggest that lesbian women see an earnings premium of motherhood.
I confirm the earnings penalty for straight women but reject a general earnings premium for lesbian mothers; instead, I find suggestive evidence of a motherhood wage premium specifically for lesbian mothers who do not specialize in housework.
In contrast, earning more, working more, or doing less housework than their partner are not enough to eliminate the motherhood earnings penalty for straight women, though all reduce it. The second chapter is co-authored with Paul Seabright; in it, we investigate the idea that social norms against casual sex may inadvertently result in higher rates of sexual assault by incentivizing individuals to consume alcohol as a "disinhibitor" before attempting to find a sexual partner.
We construct a decision-theoretic model in which a student may make the decision to consume alcohol as a way of strategically weakening the pressure from social norms against casual sex; the consumption of alcohol then drives incidents of sexual violence. We take this model to data from the US National Incident-Based Reporting System, using the presence of Planned Parenthood in the university's county as a proxy for the strength of social norms against casual sex.
