ENRIQUETA ARAGONES' RESEARCH
The following is a description of my research interests. Most of my
research is in Political Economics, but I have also done some work on Social
Choice, Learning, and Gender Economics.
Political Economics
Political Economics is a term coined by Roger Myerson to define the
application of Economic Analysis to political institutions. It is devoted to
the study of political institutions by the methods for analysis of behavior developed in Economics.
Social and political institutions are enduring systems of social
constraint on human behavior. Institutional reforms
are generally advocated with the goal of improving people's welfare in a
society. Economic analysis has developed to provide a methodology to evaluate
proposals intended to reform institutions.
Political institutions are represented as simplified games where the
preferences of all actors (parties, candidates, voters, …) are precisely
specified. We analyze the strategic behavior of the actors in any given situation represented
by a game, and look for its equilibria, that is, profiles of best responses
that lead to stable outcomes. Equilibria allows us to make predictions of the
consequences of a given political institution over society's welfare. A
proposed reform of a political institution would then correspond to a change in
the rules of this political game, which could in turn change the rational
equilibrium behavior in the game.
By examining many such models, and by relating the theoretical analysis
to empirical findings from comparative politics, we can gradually build a
better understanding of the significance of different political institutions.
Work in this area may ultimately have great practical value in finding
institutional structures that can improve the chances for the sustenance and
spread of representative democracy in the world.
Understanding that the choice among different forms of democracy is a
matter of great potential importance, we should learn more about how democratic
structures may affect the performance of governments.
Most of my research in Political Economics is devoted to the study of
the strategic interactions among the agents (candidates, parties, voters, …)
involved in an election. The set of topics I have studied is the following:
1)
Negativity Effect
2)
Political Ambiguity
3)
Campaign Rhetoric
4)
Elections with a Favored Candidate
5)
Participatory Democracy
6)
Electoral Participation
7)
Government Formation
8)
Electoral Issues
9) Corruption
10) Party
Politics
1) Negativity Effect: This project deals with the
limitations to acquisition and processing of information faced by the different
agents involved in an election. The aim of this research is to find a
convincing way to model the behavior of these
different agents. Analyzing the information
available to each type of agent, and the use they make of it, is a most
important step in this direction. In particular, I am interested in the
interplay between rational strategic behavior and
psychological biases.
Negativity
Effect and the Emergence of Ideologies. Published in
the Journal of Theoretical Politics (1997) 9(2):198-210. In
this paper I study the information processing tasks of the voters. It
presents a model that attempts to explain certain empirical characteristics of
the behavior of voters facing an election. The
main result of this model is that parties whose only objective is to maximize
the number of votes behave as if they had an ideology, that is, an ideal point
in the policy space.
A
Dynamic Model of Multiparty Competition In this paper I
offer a generalization of the previous model for the case of three-party
competition. The results I find for three party competition are
qualitatively the same, and I show that they can be easily generalized to more
than three parties. This paper allows us to test the robustness of the
previous results. Furthermore, if we assume that parties and candidates
have different objectives, an additional result of the three-party model shows
the formation of parties, as infinitely lived agents with a certain ideology,
out of the competition of myopic candidates freely choosing policy
positions.
2) Political Ambiguity: Focusing on the ambiguity
of candidates during electoral campaigns, we try to explain how in an electoral
competition model with fully rational voters, political ambiguity can increase
the number of voters to whom a party may appeal.
Strategic
Ambiguity in Electoral Competition, joint with Zvika
Neeman. Published in the Journal of
Theoretical Politics (2000) 12(2):183-204. This paper is about the
strategic choice of platforms by candidates. In particular, it focuses on the
amount of information that candidates are willing to release to the voters,
analysing a spatial model of two party electoral
competition. We characterize those cases in which parties prefer to
present ambiguous platforms and differentiate from each other ideologically,
and those cases in which parties prefer to present identical ideologies with
specific platforms.
Ambiguity
in Election Games, joint with Andrew Postlewaite.
Published in Review of Economic Design (2002) 7(3): 233-255.
We construct a model in which the ambiguity of candidates allows them to
increase the number of voters to whom they appeal. We focus our analysis on two
points that are central to obtain ambiguity in equilibrium: restrictions on the
beliefs that candidates can induce in voters, and intensity of voters'
preferences. The first is necessary for a pure strategy equilibrium to exist,
while the second is necessary in order to obtain ambiguity in equilibrium when
there exists a Condorcet winner in the set of pure alternatives and when the
candidates' only objective is to win the election. The intuition is that an
ambiguous candidate may offer voters with different preferences the hope that
their most preferred alternative will be implemented. We also show that if
there are sufficiently many candidates, ambiguity will not be possible in
equilibrium, but a larger set of possible policies increases the chance that at
least one candidate will choose to be ambiguous in equilibrium.
3) Campaign Rhetoric: Campaign statements are
cheap talk, that is, fixing all actions of all participants, payoffs do not
change when messages alone are changed. We outline the necessary ingredients of
a rational actor model in which campaign rhetoric may matter. We analyze how rhetoric may matter in repeated election
models. We show how candidates may (rationally) choose to maintain a reputation
for fulfilling campaign promises. We further discuss the determinants of the
set of promises that candidates can credibly make in equilibrium.
Political Reputations and Campaign
Promises, joint with Thomas Palfrey and Andrew Postlewaite. Published in the Journal of the European
Economic Association, (2007) 5(4): 846-884. We analyze
conditions under which campaign rhetoric may affect the beliefs of the voters
over what policy will be implemented by the winning candidate of an election.
We develop a model of infinitely repeated elections with complete information
in which candidates are purely ideological. We analyze
an equilibrium in which all campaign promises are believed by voters, and honored by candidates, and voters' strategies involve a
credible threat to punish candidates who renege of their campaign promises. We
obtain that the degree to which promises are credible in equilibrium is an
increasing function of the value of a candidate's reputation.
Information transmission and Reputational Dynamics in
Repeated Elections joint with Thomas Palfrey and Andrew Postlewaite. We explore an equilibrium model of information
transmission in repeated elections with two parties. Parties use strategies
that trade off the long term benefits of maintaining a
reputation for trustworthiness with the short term policy benefits of holding
office. Several different equilibrium regimes may arise endogenously, including
"alternating reputations" where one party enjoys a good reputation
for several periods, and then loses it, and then regains it at a later point in
time. This should lead to a stochastic cycle of reputations in which parties
transmit useful information to the voters.
Campaign Rhetoric: a learning model, joint with Thomas
Palfrey and Andrew Postlewaite. We analyze conditions under which a candidate's campaign
rhetoric may affect the beliefs of the voters over what policy the candidate
will implement in case he wins the election. We develop a model of repeated
elections with asymmetric information in which candidates are purely
ideological and voters do not know the policy preferences of the candidates. In
this model voters acquire information regarding the candidates' policy
preferences from the fact that candidates renege or fulfill
their campaign promises.
Campaign Rhetoric and Endorsements in Electoral
Competition, joint with Andrew Postlewaite. We analyze the strategic interaction of political parties and
potential endorsers during an electoral campaign in order to affect the outcome
of the election. As a result of this interaction, voters' beliefs on the
preferences of the parties may be affected. Political campaigns can be
represented by signalling games, and the application of the cheap talk
refinement literature appears to be a helpful tool to understand the beliefs
that can be induced in voters.
4) Elections with a Favored
Candidate: We examine competition in the standard one-dimensional Downsian model of two-candidate elections, where one
candidate (A) enjoys an advantage over the other candidate (D). Voter
preferences are Euclidean, but any voter will vote for candidate A over
candidate D unless D is closer to her ideal point by some fixed distance. The
location of the median voter's ideal point is uncertain, and its distribution
is commonly known by both candidates. The candidates simultaneously choose
locations to maximize the probability of victory. Pure strategy
equilibria often fail to exist in this model, except under special conditions
about the magnitude of the advantage and the distribution of the median ideal
point.
Mixed
Strategy Equilibrium in a Downsian Model with a Favored Candidate, joint with Thomas Palfrey.
Published in the Journal of Economic Theory (2002) 103(1):
131-161. We consider a finite policy space within the unit interval
and solve for the essentially unique symmetric mixed strategy equilibrium. We
show that candidate A adopts more moderate policies than candidate D, and we
obtain some comparative statics results about the probability of victory and
the expected distance between the policies proposed by the two candidates.
The Effect of Candidate Quality on Electoral Equilibrium: An
Experimental Study, joint with Thomas Palfrey. Published in
the American Political Science Review (2004) 98(1): 77-90. We
test three of the predictions from the previous paper, namely: 1) the better
candidate adopts more centrist policies than the worse candidate, 2) the
equilibrium is statistical, in the sense that it predicts a probability
distribution of outcomes rather than a single degenerate outcome, and 3) the
equilibrium varies systematically with the level of uncertainty about the
location of the median voter. We use laboratory experiments and find strong
support for all three. We also observe some biases and show that they can be
explained by Quantal Response Equilibrium.
Spatial Competition Between Two Candidates of Different Quality:
The Effects of Candidate Ideology and Private Information, joint with
Thomas Palfrey. Published in Social Choice and Strategic Decisions:
Essays in Honor of Jeffrey S. Banks, Ed. David
Austen-Smith and John Duggan, (2005) Berlin: Springer. We extend the previous
model by assuming that candidates care not only about winning but also have
policy preferences. We also assume that there is two-dimensional private
information: candidates’ ideal points as well as their tradeoffs
between policy preferences and winning. We characterize the effects of
increased uncertainty about the median voter, the effect of candidates’ policy
preferences, and the effects of changes in the distribution of private
information on the equilibrium outcome.
Candidate Quality in a Downsian Model
with a Continuous Policy Space, joint with Dimitrios
Xefteris. Published in Games and Economic Behavior (2012) 75:464-480. This paper
characterizes a unique mixed strategy Nash equilibrium in a one-dimensional Downsian model of two-candidate elections with a continuous
policy space, where candidates are office motivated and one candidate enjoys a
non-policy advantage over the other candidate. We show that if voters’ utility
functions are concave and the median voter ideal point is drawn from a unimodal
distribution, there is a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium where the advantaged
candidate chooses the ideal point of the expected median voter with probability
one and the disadvantaged candidate uses a mixed strategy that is symmetric
around it. Existence conditions require the variance of the distribution to be
small enough relative to the size of the advantage.
Imperfectly
informed voters and strategic extremism, joint with Dimitrios
Xefteris. Published in the International
Economic Review (2017) 58(2):439-471. We analyze
an electoral competition model with two office motivated candidates where
voters use shortcuts (e.g. interest-group/media endorsements) to infer the
policy platforms of the competing candidates. That is, voters have imperfect
information about the candidates' policy proposals: they do not observe the
exact policy proposals of the candidates but only which candidate offers the
most leftist/rightist platform. We also consider the possibility that voters
use a biassed tie breaking rule that assigns a
non-policy advantage to one of the candidates. In the unique equilibrium of the
game the behavior of the two candidates tends to
maximum extremism, but it may converge or diverge depending on the size of the
candidate's advantage. For small values of the advantage candidates converge to
the extreme policy that is most preferred by the median voter and for large
values of the advantage candidates' strategies diverge: each candidate
specializes in a different extreme policy. Our analysis shows that the
imperfect information of the voters about the candidates' strategies leads
candidates to choose extreme policies, while the presence of the non-policy
advantage leads candidates to choose diverging policies.
Voters'
private valuation of candidates' quality, joint with Dimitrios Xefteris. Published in
the Journal of Public Economics (2017) 156:121-130. Different
voters might have different valuations of candidates' qualitative features. We
argue that this intuitive fact acts as a strong stabilizing force on electoral
competition dynamics (pure strategy equilibria may exist, unlike when all
voters favor the same candidate); and, perhaps more
importantly it affects candidates' platform moderation incentives in a rather
asymmetric manner. If voters are evenly split, in terms of their candidates'
quality valuations, then both candidates have incentives to locate sufficiently
near -but not necessarily exactly at- the expected median voter's ideal policy.
However, as the number of voters who favor the same
candidate rises, firstly, only the advantaged candidate faces increasing
incentives to further moderate, but then -after this number surpasses a certain
threshold- only the disadvantaged candidate is increasingly incentivized to
choose extreme policies. As a result, maximum equilibrium differentiation
follows a non-trivial U-shaped pattern: it is minimal when a sufficiently small
majority of voters favors a certain candidate.
Ideological
consistency and valence, joint with Dimitrios Xefteris. BSE working paper n. 1383, December 2022. We
study electoral competition between two win-motivated candidates, considering
that voters care both about the valence and the ideological consistency of the
competing candidates. When valence asymmetries are not too large, platform
polarization (i.e. the distance between the candidates’ policy proposals) is
solely determined by the strength of preferences for consistency, while the
ideological leaning of the election (i.e. the degree at which the platforms’
midpoint tilts towards the left or the right) jointly depends on valence
differences and preferences for consistency. Importantly, as the valence of the
leftist candidate increases, both platforms –and, when the uncertainty about
the voters’ preferences is high, also the expected policy outcome– move to the
right. Otherwise, if valence differences are very large, a mixed equilibrium
emerges: the high-valence left-wing candidate chooses a moderate-left policy
and the low-valence right-wing candidate responds with extreme and,
occasionally, progressive positions. Our analysis provides novel insights
regarding candidates’ flip-flopping behavior, and
parties’ motives to nominate low-quality candidates.
5) Participatory Democracy: Participatory
Democracy is a collective decision making process that
combines elements from both Direct and Representative Democracy. Citizens have
the power to decide on policy and politicians assume the role of policy
implementation.
A theory of Participatory Democracy based on the real
case of Porto Alegre, joint with Santiago Sanchez-Pages.
Published in the European Economic Review (2009) 53:56-72. We
explore a formal model of Participatory Democracy inspired in the experience of
Participatory Budgeting implemented in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. Our
model builds on the research on meetings with costly participation by Osborne,
Rosenthal, and Turner (2000). The aim of this paper is to understand how
Participatory Democracy operates, and to study its characteristics and
implications over the behavior of citizens and
politicians and over the final policy outcomes.
Accountability and incumbency (dis)advantage, joint with Santiago
Sanchez-Pages. This paper analyses the problem that an incumbent
faces during the legislature when deciding how to react to citizen
mandates such as the outcome of referenda or popular initiatives. We argue that
these mandates constitute a potential source of incumbency (dis)advantage when
citizens factor into their evaluation of the incumbent his reaction to these
proposals. We characterize conditions under which incumbents use these policy
decisions in their advantage. This is more likely to be the case the higher the
importance citizens award to their mandate, the smaller the disalignment
between the incumbent and the citizens on the issue their mandate refers to,
and the more office motivated the incumbent is. Otherwise, the incumbent
chooses to ignore the citizens' proposal at the risk of losing reelection. Finally, we apply our findings to the
experience with participatory democracy in Brazil and to the responsiveness of
politicians to popular initiatives in US states.
6) Participation:
Making
Statements and Approval Voting, joint with Itzhak Gilboa
and Andrew Weiss. Published in Theory and Decision (2001)
71(4):461-472. We assume that people have a need to make statements, and
construct a model in which this need is the sole determinant of voting behavior. In this model, an individual selects a ballot
that makes as close a statement as possible to her ideal point, where
abstaining from voting is a possible (null) statement. We show that in such a
model, a political system that adopts approval voting may be expected to enjoy a
significantly higher rate of participation in elections than a comparable
system with plurality rule.
7) Government Formation:
Government
Formation in a Two Dimensional Policy Space. Published in
the International Journal of Game Theory (2007) 35(2): 151-184.
Given any allocation of parliament seats among parties, we characterize all the
stable government configurations (supported by at least a majority of the
parliament) in terms of winning coalitions and policy outcomes. We consider a
two-dimensional policy space and we assume that there are four parties that
care mainly about holding office, and only instrumentally about policy. We find
that for any distribution of seats in the parliament only two scenarios are
possible: either there is a party that is a member of almost all equilibrium
coalitions (dominant party scenario) or there is a party that is never a member
of an equilibrium coalition (dominated party scenario). We characterize the key
party for each possible scenario and we show that it is sufficient that the key
party has intense preferences over one the issues to guarantee the formation of
a stable government coalition.
The
Key Party in the Catalan Government. Published in the Spanish
Economic Review (2007) 9(4): 249-271. This paper analyzes
the different compositions of the Catalan governing coalitions during the
current Spanish democratic period, and offers some predictions about the
coalitions that can be expected in the future. During this period, in Catalan
politics, there have been two main political issues over which the different
parties have taken positions: rightist versus leftist with respect to economic
policy, and sovereign versus centralist with respect to the power distribution
within the state. I find that for any allocation of parliament seats there is a
key party: a party that has a clear advantage in terms of being able to decide
the composition of the governing coalition. I show the features that allow a
party to become the key party and those that affect the size of the advantage
of the key party.
An Automated Model of Government Formation, joint with Pilar Dellunde published in The Political Economy of
Democracy, edited by E. Aragonès, C. Beviá, H. Llavador, N. Schofield,
published by Fundación BBVA (2009). We propose a formal model of bargaining for
government formation in a parliamentary democracy that permits the analysis of
the effects of a large class of bargaining strategies on the possibility of reaching
agreements and on the policy compromise of the members of the government
coalition that forms. We also propose a complementary algorithm that, applied
to the proposed model, would allow to implement the simulations of the
interplay of different sets of strategies. The implementation of the
combination described above should shed some light on the performance of the
different strategies according to the benefit they produce for the parties.
Government
Coalition Bargaining, joint with Pilar Dellunde
and Xavier Vilà. It aims at constructing the
algorithm proposed in "An Automated Model of Government Formation".
We simulate the interplay of several parties using different strategies, and
evaluate the payoffs they obtain from the outcomes of the simulation. We
compare the performance of the different strategies in different setups, and
conclude about the optimality of each one of the strategies characteristics. We
also allow strategies to evolve over the paying time in order to find the
optimal strategy for a party when facing a given environment. Finally, we find
the overall optimal strategies of parties that use strategies that improve over
time.
Towards a new Catalan party system. Published
in The International Catalan View, winter
2015. In the last few years the political
preferences of the Catalan society have experienced intense and continuous
changes. Large popular demonstrations and the results of many different polls
are the evidence of such changes. Increasing spread over the population of the
desire for an independent state has become the main issue of political debates.
Political parties have been forced to adapt their positions on the political
arena to the new preferences of the society. The party system, that had been a
stable system for over two decades, is bound to give rise to a new party
constellation.
Negotiations and political strategies in
the contest for Catalan independence, joint with Clara Ponsatí. Published in Catalonia: A New Independent
State in Europe? edited by Xavier Cuadras-Morató,
published by Routledge (2016). This chapter analyses the negotiations between
the Catalan and the Spanish governments and their interaction with the
electoral political competition in the present contest for Catalan
independence. Frustration to attain an agreement has fuelled powerful grass
roots pro-independence movements, and has led to the parallel evolution of
voters' political preferences, shifting them towards a more intense and
generalised desire for an independent state. We discuss the realignment of
political parties’ platforms this has brought in response. Polarised agendas
over Catalan independence have precipitated in the present situation of open
conflict between the Catalan and the Spanish governments.
The stability of
multi-level governments, joint with Clara Ponsatí.
Published in the Journal of Theoretical Politics (2021)
33(1):140–166. This paper studies the stability of a multi-level government. We
analyze an extensive form game played between two politicians
leading two different levels of government. We characterize the conditions that
render such government structures stable. We also show that if leaders care
about electoral rents and the preferences of the constituencies at different
levels are misaligned, then the decentralized government structure may be
unsustainable. This result is puzzling because, from a nor-mative
perspective, the optimality of decentralized decisions via a multi-level
government structure is relevant precisely when different territorial
constituencies exhibit preference heterogeneity.
8) Electoral Issues:
Electoral Competition through Issue
Selection, joint with Micael Castanheira and Marco Giani.
Published in the American Journal of Political Science (2015)
59(1):71-90. In reality, parties can manipulate voters’ priorities by
emphasizing issues selectively during the political campaign. This phenomenon,
known as priming, may allow parties to cut down their investment in solving the
issues that they intend to mute. We develop a model of endogenous issue
ownership in which two vote-seeking parties (i)
invest to attract voters with better policy proposals and (ii) choose a
communication campaign to focus voters’ attention on specific issues. We
identify novel feedbacks between communication and investment. In particular,
we find that stronger priming effects can backfire and constrain parties to
invest more resources in all issues, including the ones they would otherwise
prefer to mute. We also identify under which conditions parties prefer to focus
on their ‘historical issues’ or to engage in issue stealing. Typically, the
later happens when priming effects are strong and parties are less
differentiated.
Shocks to issue
salience and electoral competition, joint with Clara Ponsatí. Published in Economics of Governance (2022)
23:33-63. We propose a two party electoral competition
model to analyze the effects of an exogenous shock
over the relative issue salience on the strategic policy choices of the
parties. We find that both parties strategically shift their policy choices from
their ideal points towards the ideal point of the median voter of the newly
salient issue. The polarization of the distribution of the voters’ preferences
produces a disadvantage for one of the parties, which is forced to implement a
large policy shift. We argue that a large policy shift may break a party
internal balance among its different factions, which in turn may
produce important disruptions in the party system. We illustrate our arguments
with an analysis of recent events in Catalonia and the UK.
9) Corruption:
Voter heterogeneity
and political corruption, joint with Javier Rivas and Aron Toth. Published in
the Journal of Economic Behavior and
Organization (2020) 170:206-221. We show that policies that eliminate
corruption can depart from socially desirable policies and this inefficiency
can be large enough to allow corruption to live on. Political competition
between an honest (welfare maximiser) and corrupt politicians is studied. In
our model the corrupt politician is at a distinct disadvantage: there is no
asymmetric information, no voter bias and voters are fully rational. Yet,
corruption cannot be eliminated when voters have heterogeneous preferences.
10) Party politics:
Party structure and
leadership, joint with Clara Ponsatí, Orestis Troumpounis and Dimitrios Xefteris. The degree to
which power is shared between a party elites and its regular
members is an important feature of a party internal structure. In this paper we
analyze the determinants of party inclusiveness, that
is, the share of power that elites are willing to give up, and assign to
regular party members. We propose a formal model of intra-party politics and analyze the effect of the office rents and
partisanship preferences on the optimal decisions of a party regarding its
inclusiveness level and the ideal point of its leader. We find that ideological
parties are more inclusive than office motivated parties. However,
inclusiveness becomes irrelevant for ideological parties when partisanship is
endogenized. Finally, we show that in the long run, the only party structure
that may survive is a cadre party.
Simultaneous
Elections. BSE working paper n. 1425, December 2023. This paper analyzes the possible electoral advantages and
disadvantages of a unique party that competes in two simultaneous elections
with respect a those obtained when it competes as two different parties. I
assume that a unified party has a larger strategy set but it is required to
choose the same policy in both elections. I analyze
different scenarios depending on the features of the electorates and of the
party configuration that it faces. In all cases I show that a unified party is
more likely to fare worse than two independent parties when facing simultaneous
elections. A unified party can only obtain a gain when the distribution of the
voters' preferences of the two electorates are favorable
to the opponent.
Social Choice
A
derivation of the money Rawlsian solution. Published
in Social Choice and Welfare (1995) 12:267-276. I study the set
of envy-free allocations for economies with indivisible objects and
quasi-linear utility functions. In this paper, I find the minimal amount
of money necessary for its non-emptiness when negative distributions of money
are not allowed. I also find that, when this is precisely the available
amount of money, there is a unique way to combine objects and money such that
these bundles may form an envy-free allocation. Based on this property, I
describe a solution to the envy-free selection problem following a
pseudo-egalitarian criterion.
Learning
Fact
Free learning, joint with Itzhak Gilboa, Andrew Postlewaite,
and David Schmeidler. Published in the American
Economic Review (2005) 95 (5):1355-1368. We offer an explanation of
how people may learn without getting new factual information. We show that
given a database, finding a small set of variables that obtain a certain value
of accuracy is computationally hard, in the sense that this term is used in
computer science and we discuss some of the implications of this result and of
fact-free learning in general.
Rhetoric and analogies, joint with Itzhak Gilboa,
Andrew Postlewaite, and David Schmeidler.
Published in Research in Economics (2014) 68:1-10. This is a
joint paper with Itzhak Gilboa, Andrew Postlewaite,
and David Schmeidler. The art of rhetoric may be
defined as changing other people's minds (opinions, beliefs) without providing
them of new information. One technique heavily used by rhetoric employs
analogies. Using analogies one may draw the listener's
attention to similarities between cases and to re-organize existing information
in a way that highlights certain regularities. In this paper we offer two
models of analogies, discuss their theoretical equivalence and show that
finding good analogies is a computationally hard problem.
Gender Economics
Women make a
difference. The under-representation of women with respect
to men in many professions at all levels and in all professions at some levels
is a fact. Given that women represent about 50 per cent of the population it is
reasonable to describe this situation as gender unbalanced. The demand for a
balanced proportion of women in all professions and at all levels has been
raised and its support has been increasing over time. This demand can be based
on the claim that a world in which males and females are found in equal shares
in all professions and at all levels would be optimal. But it also can be based
on an equity claim: female and male should have the same professional
opportunities. This essay proposes different arguments about the
reasons why a world in which males and females are found in equal shares in all
professions and at all levels may be optimal. Then it analyzes
the causes of the current gender unbalanced situation and proposes mechanisms
that may induce a change from the current unbalanced situation to a world in
which males and females are found in equal shares in all professions and at all
levels.
Family Restrictions
at Work. Published in Economies (2024) 12(5):101. This paper
analyzes one of the causes of the current gender-unbalanced situation in the
labor market: the discrimination that individuals face at work due to their
commitment to unpaid care work. It aims at finding mechanisms that may induce a
change from the current unbalanced situation to a world in which males and
females are found in more equal shares in all professions and at all levels. I
construct a formal model that includes the heterogeneity of individuals
regarding their family commitments and I investigate how it affects the
individual’s optimal labor market participation. The welfare of individuals
with commitment to family duties is reduced for two different reasons: for not
being able to participate as much in the labor market and thus receive a lower
labor income and for not being able to contribute as much to their family
commitments. I compare the results for the female and male sections of the
society and I illustrate the observed gender gaps in terms of labor market
participation, income levels, and the overall utility obtained. I find that
even though the gender wage gap may be alleviated with reductions in the cost
associated to unpaid care work, the gender utility gap will persist.
Gender Choice at
Work. This paper
proposes a formal model to analyze the gender
discrimination that individuals face at work originated on the demand side of
the labor market due to statistical discrimination
and taste-based discrimination. I study the effects of discrimination on the
income and utility distributions and compare these effects between the female
and male sectors of the society. I show that the conditions that guarantee
efficiency are enough to dissipate the gender gaps. However, in order to reach
a first best it is necessary to eliminate all kinds of
discrimination.