Brown Bag Seminar with Yuan Zi, Geneva Graduate Institute

Title of the talk

Empowered Young Women:
Trade Liberalization and Women’s Family Decisions in China

Abstract

Do trade-induced labor market opportunities affect women’s marriage and fertility decisions? Exploiting regional variation in the exposure to the U.S. granting of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR), we find that more exposed Chinese prefectures experience a relative increase in the fraction of unmarried young women. This relative increase is due to young women delaying their first marriage and more married women choosing to divorce. The share of young women with children, as a result of changed marriage decisions, also experiences a relative decline in more exposed areas. We show that these shifts in family decisions coincide with a trade-induced increase in female workforce participation and reallocation of women relative to men to the service sector, where wages are higher.

About the speaker

Yuan Zi is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. She is a research affiliate of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and a research associate at the University of Oslo. She is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Geography. Her research interests include international trade and economic development, with a special focus on production networks, trade and labor market interactions, and firms in international trade. Her work has been published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of International Economics, the European Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Geography.

We strongly encourage you to attend this event on-site.
In case you cannot be present in person, please register here to attend online (via Zoom): https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0tcuCtpjMuH9FU9DbzeEaFENgLL3rUo37R