Research Seed Grant | 2001-2002

Women, Property, and Rights

by Lena Edlund (Economics)

In many societies the state and/or the family restricts a woman's access to material resources, and rights over her own labor supply and reproductive capacity. Our aim is to understand how the economic conditions in these societies cause the family and the state to deny women resources, and how variations in the politico-economic environment propel changes in the gender allocation of resources. This project will combine theoretical modeling and empirical analyses to examine how biological differences between men and women interact with the extent of scarcity of material resources in a society to affect the form and extent of gender discrimination. An important contribution of the project is the sue of detailed ethnographic information on communities to provide empirical evidence on the link between the economic conditions in a society and marriage and inheritance patterns.

See Also

• Research grant: Topics in the Political Economy of Inequality