Gender equality has become a key objective for international organizations and policymakers. It is recognized both as a fundamental human right and an important driver of economic development. Recent estimates suggest that, at the current pace, it will not be achieved before the end of this century.

A substantive body of literature suggests that the differential treatment across gender starts early on during childhood and often occurs within households, especially when these are forced to make extreme choices at the margin of subsistence. For example, poor households hit by an economic shock may have to take their children out of school in order to make them directly or indirectly contribute to the generation of income through domestic and market-oriented work. When doing so, they often shelter the boys, even though girls tend to work for longer hours to begin with, at increased risk of dropping out of school and further adverse consequences later in life.

In this project, we study different yet compatible social policy approaches to mitigating the implications of economic shocks and the extent to which they affect gender disparities in developing countries. We also study the underlying mechanisms for differences in the treatment between girls and boys when households experience an economic shock. The generated knowledge is critical for the design of new social policy interventions that would directly intervene in the mechanisms that generate gender inequalities. This project will fill important evidence gaps on the effects of social policies on gender disparities among children and the underlying motives when households face economic shocks.

Specifically, the first subproject will use the roll-out of a national program to study the prospects of relying on large-scale insurance schemes that aim to directly protect poor households from income variability caused by economic shocks. Evidence on the effects of country-wide insurance policies on the gender disparity in labor supply and schooling is currently missing in the literature.

The second subproject will generate the first comprehensive empirical assessment of the reasons for the unequal treatment of girls in the presence of an economic shock. It contributes to the theoretical underpinning of the first subproject and helps rationalize its findings. In particular, we examine the three theoretical motives of returns to labor, returns to education, and old-age support presented in the relevant literature.  

The third subproject will use the staggered implementation of a social policy that directly addresses the motive of perceived differences in the returns to education between boys and girls. Empirical evidence concerning the effects of this, or another policy aimed at mitigating one of the three motives for gender disparity in child labor and schooling is to the best of our knowledge currently missing in the relevant literature.