Essays in Gender Economics

This thesis consists of three papers on gender economics. Chapter 1 studies whether people dislike collaborating with someone who corrects them and whether the dislike is stronger when that person is a woman. Having a good relationship with colleagues is integral in group work, potentially leading to successful collaborations. However, there are occasions when people have to correct their colleagues. Using a quasi-laboratory experiment, I find that people, including those with high productivity, are less willing to collaborate with a person who has corrected them even if the correction improves group performance. In addition, I find suggestive evidence that men respond more negatively to women’s corrections, which is not driven by their beliefs about the difference in women’s and men’s abilities. These findings suggest that there is a behavioral bias in group work that distorts the optimal selection of talents and penalizes those who correct others’ mistakes, and the distortion may be stronger when women correct men. Chapter 2 studies the role of gender and cognitive skills on other peoples’ generosity. Using a novel experimental design where I exogenously vary gender and cognitive skills and sufficiently powered analysis, I find neither the two attributes nor their interactions affect other people’s generosity; if anything, people are more generous to women with high potential. Chapter 3 studies how increased legal tolerance toward domestic violence affects married women’s welfare using the domestic violence decriminalization bill introduced to the Russian national congress in 2016. Using difference-in-differences and flexibly controlling for macroeconomic shocks, I find that the bill decreased married women’s life satisfaction and increased depression, especially among those with a college degree and a highly qualified white-collar occupation supposed to be more sensitive to gender regressive atmosphere. Consistent with this conjecture, people became more tolerant toward general and domestic violence after the bill.