Women's liberation: What's in it for men

Women’s rights are closely related to economic development. This is true both across countries, where women have most rights in the richest coun-tries, and in time series data: women have slowly improved their legal po-sition in parallel with fast improvements in the standard of living. In most cases, the initial extension of rights to women amounted to a voluntary re-nouncement of power by men. In this paper, we investigate the economic in-centives for men to share power with women. We show that men may want to voluntarily relinquish some of their power once technological change in-creases the importance of human capital. The reason is that men face a trade-off between how they would ideally like to treat their own wives and how they want other women to be treated. While men might want little rights for their own wives, they may prefer their daughters to have a better bargain-ing position with future husbands. In addition, a wife’s education matters for producing high-quality children. A husband prefers his children to find high-quality mates, and therefore stands to gain from increasing the power of his children’s mothers-in-law. ∗Preliminary and incomplete. We thank Stefania Albanesi, Bob Hall, Larry E. Jones, Ethan Kaplan, Pete Klenow, as well as the audiences at a number of conferences and seminars for valuable comments that helped to improve the paper. Financial support by the National Sci