Download or read book The Economics of Gender written by Joyce P. Jacobsen and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1998 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic agents can be male or female; they interact in families and households as well as in firms and markets. Yet it is only recently that economists have begun to take the implications of these facts into account in their theory, research, and policy analysis. Informed debate in economics, in other academic fields in which gender is of concern, and in society at large depends on an understanding of the economic issues underlying such questions as "why do women earn less than men" and "why, throughout the world, have men and women tended to work in separate spheres?" "The Economics of Gender, " Second Edition offers a comprehensive, balanced, and up-to-date introduction to the new work on the differences between women's and men's economic opportunities, activities, and rewards. Although Jacobsen's primary focus is on contemporary US patterns, she devotes four chapters to cross-societal comparisons. She also takes a close look at the evolution of contemporary patterns over time and the impact on them of race, ethnicity, and class. Throughout, she discusses the pros and cons of various policies, including "comparable worth" and welfare programs. Many real-life examples and anecdotes enliven the text. Appendices provide additional help for readers who have not had a course in economics and further detail for the economically sophisticated. Clear, readable, and provocative, the Second Edition of "The Economics of Gender" will continue to be welcomed as a primary text for the growing number of courses on gender economics. It remains a valuable supplement to courses in labor economics, economic policy, and women's studies. Finally, academics and policymakers in a wide range of fields will appreciate the book as a crucial reference.

Download or read book Beyond Economic Man written by Marianne A. Ferber and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to examine the central tenets of economics from a feminist point of view. In these original essays, the authors suggest that the discipline of economics could be improved by freeing itself from masculine biases. Beyond Economic Man raises questions about the discipline not because economics is too objective but because it is not objective enough. The contributors—nine economists, a sociologist, and a philosopher—discuss the extent to which gender has influenced both the range of subjects economists have studied and the way in which scholars have conducted their studies. They investigate, for example, how masculine concerns underlie economists' concentration on market as opposed to household activities and their emphasis on individual choice to the exclusion of social constraints on choice. This focus on masculine interests, the contributors contend, has biased the definition and boundaries of the discipline, its central assumptions, and its preferred rhetoric and methods. However, the aim of this book is not to reject current economic practices, but to broaden them, permitting a fuller understanding of economic phenomena. These essays examine current economic practices in the light of a feminist understanding of gender differences as socially constructed rather than based on essential male and female characteristics. The authors use this concept of gender, along with feminist readings of rhetoric and the history of science, as well as postmodernist theory and personal experience as economists, to analyze the boundaries, assumptions, and methods of neoclassical, socialist, and institutionalist economics. The contributors are Rebecca M. Blank, Paula England, Marianne A. Ferber, Nancy Folbre, Ann L. Jennings, Helen E. Longino, Donald N. McCloskey, Julie A. Nelson, Robert M. Solow, Diana Strassmann, and Rhonda M. Williams.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Women and the Economy written by Susan L. Averett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformation of women's lives over the past century is among the most significant and far-reaching of social and economic phenomena, affecting not only women but also their partners, children, and indeed nearly every person on the planet. In developed and developing countries alike, women are acquiring more education, marrying later, having fewer children, and spending a far greater amount of their adult lives in the labor force. Yet, because women remain the primary caregivers of children, issues such as work-life balance and the glass ceiling have given rise to critical policy discussions in the developed world. In developing countries, many women lack access to reproductive technology and are often relegated to jobs in the informal sector, where pay is variable and job security is weak. Considerable occupational segregation and stubborn gender pay gaps persist around the world. The Oxford Handbook of Women and the Economy is the first comprehensive collection of scholarly essays to address these issues using the powerful framework of economics. Each chapter, written by an acknowledged expert or team of experts, reviews the key trends, surveys the relevant economic theory, and summarizes and critiques the empirical research literature. By providing a clear-eyed view of what we know, what we do not know, and what the critical unanswered questions are, this Handbook provides an invaluable and wide-ranging examination of the many changes that have occurred in women's economic lives.

Download or read book Institutions Innovation and Industrialization written by Avner Greif and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together a group of leading economic historians to examine how institutions, innovation, and industrialization have determined the development of nations. Presented in honor of Joel Mokyr—arguably the preeminent economic historian of his generation—these wide-ranging essays address a host of core economic questions. What are the origins of markets? How do governments shape our economic fortunes? What role has entrepreneurship played in the rise and success of capitalism? Tackling these and other issues, the book looks at coercion and exchange in the markets of twelfth-century China, sovereign debt in the age of Philip II of Spain, the regulation of child labor in nineteenth-century Europe, meat provisioning in pre–Civil War New York, aircraft manufacturing before World War I, and more. The book also features an essay that surveys Mokyr's important contributions to the field of economic history, and an essay by Mokyr himself on the origins of the Industrial Revolution. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Gergely Baics, Hoyt Bleakley, Fabio Braggion, Joyce Burnette, Louis Cain, Mauricio Drelichman, Narly Dwarkasing, Joseph Ferrie, Noel Johnson, Eric Jones, Mark Koyama, Ralf Meisenzahl, Peter Meyer, Joel Mokyr, Lyndon Moore, Cormac Ó Gráda, Rick Szostak, Carolyn Tuttle, Karine van der Beek, Hans-Joachim Voth, and Simone Wegge.

Download or read book Three Essays in Development Economics written by David Russell Hansen and published by Stanford University. This book was released on 2011 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is composed of three chapters. All three deal with topics in development economics. The first chapter examines the effects on village institutions of introducing formal financial institution options into the village. The second addresses the effects of government policy on educational investment and crime. The third tests the explanatory power of various explanations of the gender gap in math test scores. The first chapter examines the effects of a transition from a ``traditional'' economy based on an uncertain source of income, with risk fully insured away by one's neighbors in a social network through costly network ties, to a ``modern'' economy in which some agents have access to partial insurance at a lower cost. A theoretical model is used to show that village social networks can break down as some members of the village no longer need the insurance the social network provides, producing a reduction in welfare (if the costs of reducing moral hazard are not too high) for at least some individuals and possibly the village as a whole. This loss of welfare can occur even when networks provide other benefits to those belonging to them and is likely to be heterogeneous, depending on the opportunities and networks available to individuals. This paper tests these predictions using Indonesian data to examine the effect of a change in the banking institutions available to a community on the strength of social networks (measured by community participation) and welfare (measured by household expenditure and by child health). The analysis finds that changing financial institution availability in general does not influence community participation or welfare, but that financial institutions that primarily serve certain groups do relatively reduce the welfare of households not in those groups, which is consistent with the hypotheses generated by the model. Crime is an important feature of economic life in many countries, especially in the developing world. Crime distorts many economic decisions because it acts like an unpredictable tax on earnings. In particular, the threat of crime may influence people's willingness to invest in schooling or physical capital. The second chapter explores the questions "What influence do crime rates and levels of investment have on one another?" and "How do government policies affect the relationship between investment and crime?" by creating a simple structural model of crime and educational investment and attempting to fit this model to Mexican data. A method of simulated moments procedure is used to estimate parameters of the model and the estimated parameters are then used to carry out policy simulations. The simulations show that increasing spending on police or increasing the severity of punishment reduces crime but has little effect on educational investment. Increased educational subsidies increase educational investment but reduce crime only slightly. Thus, one type of policy is insufficient to accomplish the goals of both reducing crime and increasing education. The third chapter is joint work with Prashant Bharadwaj, Giacomo De Giorgi, and Christopher Neilson. Boys tend to have better performances than girls in mathematical testing; in particular, there are significantly more boys than girls among high achievers and the score distribution appears to have a longer right tail for boys. We confirm such results on several low- and middle-income countries. In particular we find that the gender gap is already present by age 10 and substantially increases by age 14 and 15. We propose and try to test a series of explanations for such a gap: (i) parental investment, (ii) ability, (iii) school resources, (iv) individual investment and effort (not tested directly), (v) competitive environment, and (vi) cultural norms. We conclude that none of our proposed explanations can account for a substantial portion of the gap.

Download or read book Women Work and Politics written by Torben Iversen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an original and groundbreaking approach to gender inequality. Looking at women's power in the home, in the workplace, and in politics from a political economy perspective, the authors demonstrate that equality is tied to demand for women's labor outside the home, which is a function of structural, political, and institutional conditions.--[book jacket].

Download or read book Frontiers in the Economics of Gender written by Francesca Bettio and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2009-11-24 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender is now recognized as a fundamental organizing principle for economic as well as social life, and related research has grown at an unprecedented pace in the recent decades across branches of economics. The volume takes stock of this research, proposes novel analytical frameworks and outlines further research directions. It grew out of the Summer School of International Research in Pontignano (University of Siena) that traditionally brings together the most representative scholars in the chosen field. The thirteen essays included in the volume cover recent advances in gender related issues across disciplinary branches, from Economic History and the History of Economic Thought to Macroeconomics, Household Economics, the Economics of Care Work, Labour Economics, Institutional and Experimental Economics. The volume is primarily addressed to graduate students in Economics and is an essential companion for researchers in the area of Gender Economics. As most essays are written in a non-technical language it is also of interest to a wider audience, including specialists in Sociology, Demography and History.

Download or read book Institutional Economics written by Wendell Chaffee Gordon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1980 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Institutional Economics written by Bernard Chavance and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction to institutional economics, follows the history of the field since the early 20th century until the present day. It concentrates on influential authors in the main schools of institutional economics. Institutional economics is defined as economic thought that considers institutions to be relevant for economic theory, and consequently criticizes the neoclassical mainstream for having pushed them out of the discipline; it deals specially with the nature, the origin, the change of institutions, and their effects on economic performance. It is a family of different theories that were initially influential in economics, then lost much of their weight in the middle half of the 20th century, and eventually recovered significant creative vitality and impact in the last twenty years. The book puts the recent developments in historical perspective by showing how important themes like the importance of habits, the role of formal and informal rules, the relation of organizations and institutions, the hierarchy and complementarity of institutions, the evolutionary character of institutional change, have been explored by various authors or schools.

Download or read book The Economic Emergence of Women written by B. Bergmann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-09-16 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of a classic feminist book explains how one of the great historical revolutions - the ongoing movement toward equality between the sexes - has come about. Its origins are to be found, not in changing ideas, but in the economic developments that have made women's labour too valuable to be spent exclusively in domestic pursuits. The revolution is unfinished; new arrangements are needed to fight still-prevalent discrimination in the workplace, to achieve a more just sharing of housework and childcare between women and men, and, with the weakening of the institution of marriage, to re-erect a firm economic basis for the raising of children.

Download or read book Institutional Economics written by Charles J. Whalen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-28 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Institutional economics is a sociocultural discipline and policy science which draws on the idea that economies are best understood through an appreciation of history, real-world institutions, and socioeconomic interrelations. This book brings together leading institutionalists to examine the tradition’s most essential perspectives and methods. The contributors to the book draw on a broad range of institutional thought from the classic work of Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, and Karl Polanyi, to the newer viewpoints of post-Keynesian institutionalism, feminist institutionalism, and environmental institutionalism. Methods range from frameworks used to analyze public policy and institutional change, to modes of analysis including myth busting, historically grounded narratives, and computer-based simulations. Each chapter surveys the origins, development, key features, applications, and frontiers of a particular viewpoint, framework, or mode of analysis. Due consideration is given to both strengths and weaknesses; and woven into the chapters is attention to core institutionalist concepts, including technology, institutions, culture, and complexity. The book provides economists with promising starting points for new research, students with contributions refreshingly in touch with the real world, and policymakers and social scientists with compelling reasons for engaging further with the institutionalist tradition.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Dynamics of Informal Institutional Change in Sub Saharan Africa written by Benjamin D. Linkow and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Robinson Crusoe s Economic Man written by Ulla Grapard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-04-27 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, economists and literary scholars examine the uses to which the Robinson Crusoe figure has been put by the economics discipline since the publication of Defoe’s novel in 1719. The authors’ critical readings of two centuries of texts that have made use of Robinson Crusoe undermine the pervasive belief of mainstream economics that Robinson Crusoe is a benign representative of economic agency, and that he, like other economic agents, can be understood independently of historical and cultural specificity. The book provides a detailed account of the appearance of Robinson Crusoe in the economics literature and in a plethora of modern economics texts, in which, for example, we find Crusoe is portrayed as a schizophrenic consumer/producer trying to maximize his personal well-being. Using poststructuralist, feminist, postcolonial, Marxist and literary criticism approaches, the authors of the fourteen chapters in this volume examine and critique some of the deepest, fundamental assumptions neoclassical economics hold about human nature; the political economy of colonization; international trade; and the pervasive gendered organization of social relations. The contributors to this volume can be seen as engaging in the emerging conversation between economists and literary scholars known as the New Economic Criticism. They offer unique perspectives on how the economy and economic thought can be read through different disciplinary lenses. Economists pay attention to rhetoric and metaphor deployed in economics, and literary scholars have found new areas to explore and understand by focusing on economic concepts and vocabulary encountered in literary texts.

Download or read book Gender and the Dismal Science written by Ann Mari May and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The economics profession is belatedly confronting glaring gender inequality. Women are systematically underrepresented throughout the discipline, and those who do embark on careers in economics find themselves undermined in any number of ways. Women in the field report pervasive biases and barriers that hinder full and equal participation—and these obstacles take an even greater toll on women of color. How did economics become such a boys’ club, and what lessons does this history hold for attempts to achieve greater equality? Gender and the Dismal Science is a groundbreaking account of the role of women during the formative years of American economics, from the late nineteenth century into the postwar period. Blending rich historical detail with extensive empirical data, Ann Mari May examines the structural and institutional factors that excluded women, from graduate education to academic publishing to university hiring practices. Drawing on material from the archives of the American Economic Association along with novel data sets, she details the vicissitudes of women in economics, including their success in writing monographs and placing journal articles, their limitations in obtaining academic positions, their marginalization in professional associations, and other hurdles that the professionalization of the discipline placed in their path. May emphasizes the formation of a hierarchical culture of status seeking that stymied women’s participation and shaped what counts as knowledge in the field to the advantage of men. Revealing the historical roots of the homogeneity of economics, this book sheds new light on why biases against women persist today.

Download or read book Institutional Change and Globalization written by John L. Campbell and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2004-08-15 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about some of the most important problems confronting social scientists who study institutions and institutional change. It is also about globalization, particularly the frequent claim that globalization is transforming national political and economic institutions as never before.

Download or read book The New Institutional Economics and Third World Development written by John Harriss and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1995-12-14 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new institutional economics is one of the the most important new bodies of theory to emerge in economics in recent years. The contributors to this volume address its significance for the developing world. The book is a major contribution to an area of debate still in its formative phase. The book challenges the orthodoxies of development, espec

Download or read book The Founding of Institutional Economics written by Warren Samuels and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-08 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Institutional economics has been a major part of economic thought for the whole of the twentieth century, and today remains crucial to an understanding of the development of heterodox economics. The two principal publications that founded the school were Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class and Commons's A Sociological View of Sovereignty, both published in 1899. As a tribute to these two seminal works, Warren Samuels has assembled an exceptionally prestigious international group of scholars to produce this landmark volume celebrating the centenary. The chapters assess the work of Veblen and Commons and their influence on the school of institutional economics from a variety of theoretical perspectives. The contributions on Veblen appraise his anthropological analysis of consumption habits of American households from sociological, linguistic and feminist points of view. Conversely, the essays on Commons's work focus on the concepts of property, power and the relationship between legality and economics.