Financial Inclusion in Latin America

That is from a paper by Liliana Rojas-Suarez and Maria Alejandra Amado. From the abstract:

A key finding of this paper is that although the four types of obstacles explain the absolute level of financial inclusion, institutional deficiencies and income inequality are the most important obstacles behind the Latin America’s financial inclusion gap. From our analysis at the individual level, we find that there is a Latin America-specific effect of education and income. The results suggest that the effect of attaining secondary education on the probability of being financially included is significantly higher in Latin America than in its comparators. Furthermore, the difference in the probability of being financially included between the richest and the poorest individuals is significantly higher in Latin America than in comparator countries.

The Lehman Sisters hypothesis

By David Shankbone, Creative Commons

This article explores the Lehman Sisters hypothesis. It reviews empirical literature about gender differences in behavioural, experimental and neuro-economics as well as in other fields of behavioural research. It discusses gender differences along three dimensions of financial behaviour: risk aversion and response to uncertainty, ethics and moral attitudes, and leadership. The article argues that gender stereotypes are influential in finance, constraining women to achieve top positions in banking and sustaining a strong masculine culture. At the same time the analysis indicates that the few women who make it to the top tend to perform on average better than men, in particular under uncertainty. This is explained by a combination of gender beliefs, gender stereotypes, gender identity and flexible biological processes. Although further research is necessary, the existing empirical literature would support a plea for having more rather than fewer women in financial trade, risk management and at the top of the financial sector.

The article, by Irene van Staveren, is published in the Camb. J. Econ. (March 2014), and a draft is here (2012).

Attitudes Toward Bribery in Australia

Overall – Opposition to bribe taking was strong.
Gender – Females were significantly more opposed to bribe taking than men.
Age – The relationship between age and attitude toward bribe taking was linear. The older the age group, the more opposition there was to bribe taking…
Religiosity - Those who considered themselves to be religious were most strongly opposed to bribe taking, followed by nonreligious people and atheists.
Marital Status – Married and widowed people were most opposed to bribe taking, followed by divorced, separated, living together as married and single/never married people.
Education Level – Education was not a significant variable.
Employment Status – Retired people were most strongly opposed to bribe taking, followed by housewives, the self-employed, students, full-time and part-time employees and unemployed.

The paper is by Teresa Hernandez & Robert W. McGee.

Female leadership, performance, and governance in microfinance institutions

This paper investigates the relations between female leadership, firm performance, and corporate governance in a global panel of 329 Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) in 73 countries covering the years 1998–2008. The microfinance industry is particularly suited for studying the impact of female leadership on governance and performance because of its mission orientation, its entrepreneurial nature, diverse institutional conditions, and high percentage of female leaders. We find female leadership to be significantly associated with larger boards, younger firms, a non-commercial legal status, and more female clientele. Furthermore, we find that a female chief executive officer and a female chairman of the board are positively related to MFI performance, but this result is not driven by improved governance.

Alas, I did not find the paper online and many questions remain, such as the definition of "performance." In general however, the paper adds to the positive effect of female leadership. 

The paper is by Reidar Øystein Strøma, Bert D’Espallierb, & Roy Mersland (Journal of Banking & Finance, May 2014).

. . . unmarried women are spectacularly loyal to the Democrats.

Yet unmarried women are spectacularly loyal to the Democrats.

And more from this The Economist article 

. . . unmarried women are one of America’s fastest-growing groups, leaping from 45m in 2000 to around 53m today—making them, in theory, a larger block of eligible voters than blacks and Hispanics put together (though in reality the groups overlap).

And in a related topic from an article in Demography (October 2013)

Results show that increases in the proportion of women unmarried by age 40 contributed most to the increase in childlessness in the late twentieth century, although these increases were offset somewhat by increased childbearing among unmarried women. The rising proportion of women with a college degree also explained a substantial amount of the increase in childless women.

The article is titled "Marriage (Still) Matters: The Contribution of Demographic Change to Trends in Childlessness in the United States," and it is by Sarah R. Hayford. 

Some illustrative graphs are here. 

Men, women, and machines: How trade impacts gender inequality

This paper studies the effect of trade liberalization on an under-explored aspect of wage inequality — gender inequality. We consider a model where firms differ in their productivity and workers are differentiated by skill as well as gender. A reduction in tariffs induces more productive firms to modernize their technology and enter the export market. New technologies involve computerized production processes and lower the need for physically demanding skills. As a result, the relative wage and employment of women improves in blue-collar tasks, but not in white-collar tasks. We test our model using a panel of establishment level data from Mexico exploiting tariff reductions associated with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Consistent with our theory we find that tariff reductions caused new firms to enter the export market, update their technology and replace male blue-collar workers with female blue-collar workers.

That is from this paper by Chinhui Juhn, Gergely Ujhelyi, & Carolina Villegas-Sanchez. A draft is here. 

Female Business Ownership and Informal Sector Persistence (India)

. . . [T]he unorganized [informal] sector has more than kept pace such that the unorganized sector’s share of employment has increase from 80.3% in 1994 to 81.5% in 2005 . . .  What is striking is the substantial increase in female-owned business from 9.2% of employment in 1994 to 18.7% of employment in 2005. 

In the graph "mfg" is probably manufacturing growth. 
From a paper by Ejaz Ghani, William R. Kerr, & Stephen D. O’Connell.

The explain (p. 5)

Cross-country data from the World Bank Entrepreneurship Snapshots find that India’s rate of entrepreneurship is lower than its stage of development would suggest; similar comparisons also highlight that India’s gender ratio among entrepreneurs is lower than its peers. This dual under-performance has cultural and economic antecedents, but it is starting to change. Women are making economic gains in the Indian economy, and further progress represents a tremendous growth opportunity for the country. This paper identifies how this process can contribute to persistence of the informal sector, which is an important consideration for how policy makers view and treat the informal sector.

HT: Catalina Granda Carvajal

Gender and Banking: Are Women Better Loan Officers?

This study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to explicitly consider the role of the gender of the lender by analyzing performance differences across loan officer gender. Our main finding is that gender indeed seems to matter in banking: female loan officers have statistically and economically significantly lower arrear probabilities associated with their borrowers. This novel result holds for both female and male borrowers, with the effect being more pronounced for female borrowers, and is robust to a series of additional tests. . . 

Our results are consistent with female loan officers being better at building trust relationships. We offer two pieces of evidence for this. First, female loan officers have always—independent of their experience—a performance advantage with female borrowers, while they build up this advantage with male borrowers only over time with experience. Second, female loan officers have no performance advantage with legal entities where establishing a trust relationship is more difficult. This is consistent with experimental evidence that women are more likely to agree with women in ultimatum games (Eckel and Grossman, 2001). It is also consistent with the results in Adams and Ferreira (2009) that women seem to strengthen monitoring when joining corporate boards and shows that in addition to career concerns, compensation schemes, and information asymmetries (Agarwal and Wang, 2009), gender can play an important role in loan officer performance.

The study is by Beck, Behr & Guettler (Review of Finance).

Parental time and child outcomes. Does gender matter?

Using different econometric specifications this paper analyzes the relationship between the time parents spend with their children, child-related expenditure and the results obtained by them, with particular attention to gender differences. The authors use PSID-CDS data from 1997 to 2007 and consider separately boys’ and girls’ test scores in reading and writing and math and logical reasoning. The amount of time mothers spend with children is always greater than fathers but changes over the life cycle of the children. In fact, the time mothers spend with children decreases as the child grows up and is greater with daughters, while the reverse is true of fathers. The estimates show that the impact of mothers’ and fathers’ time with children varies considerably with respect to the two cognitive tests, and is considerably greater in the case of highly-educated parents.

Source: Del Boca & Mancini (July 2013). 

The data is from the US.
Very interesting economics research coming out of Italy, which has happened for some time now. May be that is usually the case.

Boards and gender

How does gender-balance affect the working of boards of directors? I examine boards that have been required for two decades to be relatively gender-balanced: boards of business companies in which the Israeli government holds a substantial equity interest. I construct a novel database based on the detailed minutes of 402 board- and board-committee meetings of eleven such companies. I find that boards that had critical masses of at least three directors of each gender in attendance, and particularly of three women, were approximately twice as likely both to request further information and to take an initiative, compared to boards that did not have such critical masses. Consistent with these findings, the ROE and net profit margin of these type of companies is significantly larger in companies that have at least three women directors. Taken together, the study demonstrates that gender-balanced boards are more active, and that firms with gender-balanced boards exhibit better financial performance.

Source.  

Women voted for change, men for status quo (India)

We document the political participation of women in Indian democracy by comparing the turnout of women voters to men in the state elections from 1962 till 2012. Our analysis reveals striking findings: (1) There is a steady and a sharp decline in the gender bias in voting over time. In particular, we find that the sex ratio of voters (the number of women voters to every 1000 men voters) increased very impressively from 715 in the 1960s to 883 in the 2000s. (2) This phenomenon of declining gender bias in voting is across all the states, including the traditionally backward “BIMARU” states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. (3) This decline is solely driven by the dramatic increase in women participation in the elections since the 1990s, while men participation has remained unchanged. (4) We also find evidence that women voters are agents of change - they vote differently from men and affect re-election prospects.

That is from this paper by (Kapoor & Ravi, March 2013). The authors find that increasing female voting has a negative effect on the probability of reelection of a political party, while male voting has a positive effect. Women vote for change. 

More female workers

This paper analyzes the interrelation between men's gender role attitudes and female labor supply decision. Following Fernández et al. (2004), I argue that the recent increases in the female labor market participation rate are driven by the growing proportion of men who were brought up in a family with a working mother. First, the paper reexamines the results of the cross-section analysis of Fernández et al. (2004) using the Swiss Household Panel 2005 to illustrate that married women whose mothers-in-law were working are themselves significantly more likely to be in the labor force. In a second step, the paper attempts to test one of their model's crucial mechanisms and show that the effect of a wife's labor market integration on her husband's well-being diverges depending on the former labor market status of his mother. Taken together, this evidence can be interpreted as varying preferences for women with high labor market integration due to exposure to certain sexual stereotypes early in life.

Source: Aline Bütikofer (Labor Economics, January 2013). A draft (2008) is here. [Labor Economics is great!]

More on Corruption and Gender

This is the abstract of new paper by Fernanda Rivas published in the Bulletin of Economic Research (January 2013):

A number of papers with field data have found differences in the corrupt activities of males and females; nonetheless they have drawbacks that may be overcome in a laboratory experiment. The aim of this paper is to see experimentally whether women and men, facing the same situation behave in a different way, as suggested in the field-data studies or, on the contrary, whether they behave in the same way. The results found in the experiment show that women are indeed less corrupt than men. 

A draft (2008) is here.  
More on this topic:  
Experimental economics: Gender and corruption.
See also: Women and budget deficits. 

Gender Differences in Salary Negotiation

One explanation advanced for the persistent gender pay differences in labor markets is that women avoid salary negotiations. By using a natural field experiment that randomizes nearly 2,500 job-seekers into jobs that vary important details of the labor contract, we are able to observe both the nature of sorting and the extent of salary negotiations. We observe interesting data patterns. For example, we find that when there is no explicit statement that wages are negotiable, men are more likely to negotiate than women. However, when we explicitly mention the possibility that wages are negotiable, this difference disappears, and even tends to reverse. In terms of sorting, we find that men in contrast to women prefer job environments where the ‘rules of wage determination’ are ambiguous. This leads to the gender gap being much more pronounced in jobs that leave negotiation of wage ambiguous.

That is from the new paper "Do Women Avoid Salary Negotiations? Evidence from a Large Scale Natural Field Experiment", by Andreas Leibbrandt & John A. List (November 2012).

On the origins of gender roles

. . . [T]he descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture, today have less equal gender norms, measured using reported gender-role attitudes and female participation in the workplace, politics and entrepreneurial activities. To test for the importance of culture, we examine second-generation immigrants living within Europe and the United States. We find that even among individuals born and raised in the same country, those with a heritage of traditional plough use exhibit less equal beliefs about gender roles today.

Source: a working paper by Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn (March 1012).  

Graph of the day

The graph shows the enrollment ratio vs female age at first marrieage in OECD countries. The source is the new paper "Gender Differences in Education" (February 2012) by Tuomas Pekkarinen.

The paper concludes:

The rapid growth in female educational attainment is one of the most striking trends in education statistics in the post WWII world. In an increasing number of industrialized countries female educational attainment is now higher than male educational attainment. Women are in majority among secondary school graduates, among tertiary level students, and among tertiary level graduates. Judging from recent trends in international data, it seems likely to that female dominance in educational attainment is becoming stronger in the coming decades.

Female representation and crime

Using state-level variation in the timing of political reforms, we find that an increase in female representation in local government induces a large and significant rise in documented crimes against women in India. Our evidence suggests that this increase is good news, as it is driven primarily by greater reporting rather than greater incidence of such crimes. In contrast, we find no increase in crimes against men or gender-neutral crimes. We also examine the effectiveness of alternative forms of political representation: large scale membership of women in local councils affects crime against them more than their presence in higher level leadership positions.

That is from the interesting paper The Power of Political Voice: Women's Political Representation and Crime in India by Iyer et al. Via Clarence Nkengne Tsimpo.

Women and budget deficits

A panel regression analysis of the impact of the franchise on budget deficits in Swiss cantons shows that Swiss women indeed prefer lower budget deficits than men. The effect is small, but significant and very robust, implying that female enfranchisement may have mitigated the debt built-ups of the last decades. On a more general note, the findings suggest that vesting economic and political power with women is likely to change macroeconomic outcomes, not just because female empowerment doubles the available amount of talent or labor in the economy, but because women’s preferences, and therefore decisions, are different from men’s.

That is from a paper by Krogstrup and Wälti. It was published in September 2011 in The Scandinavian Journal of Economics.

Are skilled women more migratory than skilled men?

This is the conclusion of the paper: Are skilled women more migratory than skilled men? by Docquier et al. Forthcoming in "World Development."

In this paper we have empirically addressed the following question: are skilled women qualitatively and quantitatively different from skilled men with respect to international migration? To do so, we have built on a structural system of symultaneous equations able to control not only for some gender specific characteristics beside the standard determi- nants of international labor mobility but also for the interdependencies between women and men’s decisions. We had indeed in mind some kind of assortative matching process between females and males that cannot be neglected. Our results suggest that women and men do not respond in the same way to the same push factors. First of all, women tend to follow men in a more intensive way than the other way round. This corresponds to what happens in the context of family reunion programs for example, where many more women are admitted abroad with respect to men. It also reflects the common presumption that associates females to some ‘biological vulnerability’, in the sense that women would bene- fit more than do men from travelling accompanied or from information about safe routes. But, complementary to this outcome, our analysis has also shown that females cannot be seen just as passive migrants. Indeed, being other factors equal, they seem to be more positevely selected than men. Finally, from a quantitative viewpoint, the hypothesis that skilled women are more migratory than skilled men is rejected by both traditional and a counterfactual exercise, excluding the presence of a genetic or social female biased gender gap in the brain drain.