Elissa Braunstein

Gender bias and central bank policy: employment and inflation reduction

This article considers the employment costs of inflation reduction in developing countries from a gender perspective. We explore two broad empirical questions: (1) what is the impact of inflation reduction on employment, and is the impact different for women and men, and (2) how are monetary policy indicators (e.g. real interest rates) connected to deflationary episodes and gender‐specific employment effects? We find a common pattern among countries undergoing what we term contractionary inflation reduction, or periods of declining inflation that are accompanied by a loss of formal employment. After controlling for long‐term employment trends, we find that the ratio of women’s to men’s employment tends to decline during these periods in the majority of countries examined. During the fewer periods of expansionary inflation reduction, however, there are no clear patterns to the relative changes in women’s and men’s employment. Maintaining competitive exchange rates seems to counterbalance the gender‐biased effects of contractionary inflation reduction episodes, however.

Foreign direct investment and gendered wages in urban China

Abstract This paper documents the changing impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on gendered wages in urban China. Combining household survey data from 1995 and 2002 with province-level macro-data, the paper finds that FDI as a proportion of investment has a sizable and statistically significant positive effect on both female and male wages in both years. In 1995, women experienced larger gains from FDI than men, but those gender-based advantages had reversed by 2002, with men experiencing larger wage gains from FDI than women. The paper argues that these results reflect the shift of foreign-invested enterprises to higher productivity and more domestically oriented production, a shift that interacts with gender-based employment segregation to more greatly advantage workers in male-dominated than female-dominated industries. These findings indicate that FDI can have considerable structural effects on economies that reach beyond the particular workers and firms linked to foreign investors.

Embedding Care and Unpaid Work in Macroeconomic Modeling: A Structuralist Approach

Abstract This study embeds paid and unpaid care work in a structuralist macroeconomic model. Care work is formally modeled as a gendered input into the market production process via its impact on the current and future labor force, with altruistic motivations determining both how much support people give one another and the economic effectiveness of that support. This study uses the model to distinguish between two types of economies – a “selfish” versus an “altruistic” economy – and seeks to understand how different macroeconomic conditions and events play out in the two cases. Whether and how women and men share the financial and time costs of care condition the results of the comparison with more equal sharing of care responsibilities making the “altruistic” case more likely.

Patriarchy versus Islam: Gender and Religion in Economic Growth

ABSTRACT This contribution evaluates whether affiliation with Islam is a theoretically and statistically robust proxy for patriarchal preferences when studying the relationship between gender inequality and economic growth. A cross-country endogenous growth analysis shows that direct measures of patriarchal institutions dominate a variety of religious affiliation variables and model specifications in explaining country growth rates, and that using religious affiliation, particularly Islam, as a control for culture produces misleading conclusions. This result is robust to the inclusion of measures of gender inequality in education and income, indicating that establishing and maintaining patriarchal institutions (a process this study calls “patriarchal rent-seeking”) exact economic growth costs over and above those measured by standard gender inequality variables. One of the key contributions of this study is to draw on unique institutional data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Developments Gender, Institutions and Development (GID) database to better understand the gendered dynamics of growth.

Economic Growth and Employment from 1990-2010 Explaining Elasticities by Gender

In this article we estimate the growth elasticity of employment by gender for 160 countries during 1990-2010. We then econometrically model these elasticities to draw out the structural contexts in which gendered employment outcomes respond differently to growth, including measures of economic structure, demographic change, macroeconomic stability, global stance and policy, and income distribution and institutional development. Our investigation shows that the relative size of the service sector and the ratio of female to male labor force participation are key determinants of differences in employment elasticities by gender, creating higher elasticities for women than men. We also find that the terms of global integration, as measured by the current account balance, growth in the terms of trade, and the share of foreign direct investment in investment, are important for both female and male employment elasticities. JEL Classification: O5, F4, B54

Economic Policy and Human Rights: Holding Governments to Account

* Economic Policies and Human Rights Obligations: An Introduction - Radhika Balakrishnan & Diane Elson Essex * 1. Fiscal and Monetary Policy and the Right to Work and to Just and Favourable Conditions of Work: Mexico -Sarah Gammage & Kristina Pirker * 2. Human Rights Dimensions of Fiscal and Monetary Policies: United States - Radhika Balakrishnan & James Heintz * 3. Human Rights and Public Expenditure in Mexico - Daniela Ramirez Camacho * 4. Human Rights and Public Expenditure in USA - Nursel Aydiner-Avsar and Diane Elson * 5. Taxation and Economic and Social Rights in Mexico - Lourdes Colinas & Roberto Constantino * 6. Taxation and Economic and Social Rights in USA - Radhika Balakrishnan * 7. Trade Policy and Human Rights: Mexico - Alberto-Serdan-Rosales and Carlos Salas * 8. Trade Policy and Human Rights Obligations of the USA: the Case of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) - Nursel Aydiner-Avsar and Diane Elson * 9. Regulation: the Case of Pension Reform and Human Rights in Mexico - Gabriel Lara * 10. Regulation: the Case of Pension Reform and Human Rights in USA - Radhika Balakrishnan

Hybrids, Political Economy, and Macroeconomics

In this piece I comment on Nancy’s Folbre’s David Gordon Memorial Lecture for the 2012 Allied Social Science Associations meetings, focusing on the strengths of how she combines Marxian sensibilities with neoclasscial analytical tools, the advantages of her proposed definition of political economy, and extending her call for developing a macroeconomic approach to human capital. JEL codes: B50; E11; E24