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Essays in Development Economics
Abdurazzakova, Dilnovoz
Abdurazzakova, Dilnovoz
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Economics
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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/29096
Abstract
I conducted a field experiment with 9th-grade students in 58 public schools in Uzbekistan to test whether demonstrating that high-income careers are compatible with family life can increase girls' career aspirations. Schools were randomly assigned to either a control group or one of two treatments in which students watched interviews with STEM professionals whose spouses also work in STEM. In the first treatment, where professionals emphasized only STEM career advantages, I found no significant effect on girls' aspirations or STEM course enrollment. In the second treatment, where professionals additionally described how dual high-income marriages function in practice, I found a significant increase in girls' career aspirations and STEM course enrollment. For boys, neither treatment produced significant effects. Survey evidence further shows that the career+family treatment reduced both girls' and boys' perceived benefits of traditional single-earner households, suggesting shifts in beliefs about work-family compatibility as a plausible mechanism. Together, the findings suggest that the perception that high-income careers are incompatible with family life may limit girls' career aspirations.
In developed countries, public childcare programs increase female employment by easing time constraints. As we show in this paper, in low-income countries where informal care is common, such programs still increase female labor supply but through different mechanisms. Examining a childcare expansion policy in Uzbekistan, where access improved but costs remained high, we find a 12% increase in female labor supply, particularly among financially constrained families and among families valuing education. Unlike prior studies, our results indicate that the availability of informal caregivers does not reduce the policy's effect. These findings suggest that, rather than time constraints, economic factors - particularly the need to afford childcare costs - are the primary drivers linking childcare expansion to women’s employment in this context.
This paper examines the relationship between women’s empowerment and infant and young child feeding practices in Central Asia using Demographic and Health Survey datasets collected during 1995–2017. We employ a measure of women’s empowerment with three dimensions that is available for many recent surveys as well as a measure of decision-making power over use of one’s own income present for income-earning mothers in all surveys. We identify a positive association between a woman’s decision-making power—a measure of her instrumental agency—and adherence to World Health Organization–recommended feeding practices. We find little significant association between a woman’s attitude toward domestic violence, or her degree of social independence, and adherence to recommended feeding practices. Our results further show that the association between women’s decision-making power and feeding practices varies little with child gender, whether or not she cohabitates with her mother-in-law, or household wealth. We thus provide evidence from Central Asia that policies and programs intended to empower women can improve child feeding practices, with similar benefits across a variety of household types