Women's Liberation: What's in It for Men?
研究19世纪已婚女性法律权利改善背后的男性动机，发现男性在自身妻子权利与其他女性权利之间存在权衡，技术进步提升人力资本重要性时，男性可能自愿让渡权力。
The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic improvements in the legal rights of married women. Given that they took place long before women gained the right to vote, these changes amounted to a voluntary renunciation of power by men. In this paper, we investigate men's incentives for sharing power with women. In our model, women's legal rights set the marital bargaining power of husbands and wives. We show that men face a trade-off between the rights they want for their own wives (namely none) and the rights of other women in the economy. Men prefer other men's wives to have rights because men care about their own daughters and because an expansion of women's rights increases educational investments in children. We show that men may agree to relinquish some of their power once technological change increases the importance of human capital. We corroborate our argument with historical evidence on the expansion of women's rights in England and the United States. (c) 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology..