The Political Economy of Laws to "Protect'' Women" ; Joint with Matthias Doepke, Anne Hannusch and Hanno Foerster
During the fi rst half of the 20th century, the many US states introduced laws that impos ed restrictions on women's labor market opportunities. This so-called `prot ective legislation' included minimum wage laws for women, maximum hours law s, requirements to provide chairs for female employees, and restrictions on working the night shift. Eventually, these laws were lifted in the 1960s a nd 1970s through a series of Acts and Supreme Court rulings, such as the Eq ual Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. In this paper, we investigate the political economy of both the introduction and th e repeal of these laws. Specifically, we investigate the hypothesis that la bor market competition from women was the main driver of political change. To do so, we first use a political economy model to spell out the mechanism . Second, we show that when calibrated to US data, the model explains both the rise and fall of protective labor legislation remarkably well. Third, w e use new and comprehensive cross-state data to provide empirical evidence for the mechanism and contrast these findings to alternative explanations.< /p> DTSTAMP:20260426T230847Z DTSTART:20241107T163000Z DTEND:20241107T180000Z SEQUENCE:0 TRANSP:OPAQUE END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR