| Women's role in economic development can be examined from many different angles, including feminist, anthropological/sociological, economic and legislative perspectives. In this dissertation, I employ an economic perspective and focus on how females behave and are treated both at home and at work. Certain policy interventions may be more likely to succeed if they are targeted towards women provided that women spend the family income in a manner regarded as socially desirable. And understanding the reasons for wage discrimination against females can lead to policies that will improve the efficiency and equity with which human resources are utilized in a particular country.;The dissertation is in two parts. In Part I (Chapter One and Chapter Two), I proposed a method to create an index for the bargaining power between husband and wife and tests econometrically the link between this index and the pattern of expenditures as well as family labor supply within a household, drawing on U.S. data. Age, education, occupation, divorce laws, region, race and wage ratio are among the determinants of the index. And women with more bargaining power, which the index is a proxy for, give priority to consumption goods which are highly ranked in their preference ordering, such as food consumed at home, health care, reading and personal care. Parents with and without children behave in a slightly different way, in the aspects of both consumption goods and labor supply. In Part II (Chapter Three), I use household survey data in a number of Latin American countries to fit labor force participation and earnings functions models, paying special attention to the public-to-private and male-to-female earnings differentials. I also attempt an econometric decomposition to determine what part of the public/private and male/female earnings differentials can be attributed to different human capital endowments between the sectors or sexes, and what part is due to unexplained factors such as discrimination. Differences in characteristics explain only a small proportion of the wage differentials in most of the countries. The remaining proportion thus represents the upper bound to discrimination. |
