CAREER: Macroeconomic Implications of Gender Roles and Consumer Credit Markets: Using Quantitative Life-Cycle Models for Policy Analysis

该项目包括两个不同的部分：研究性别角色的宏观经济后果和决定因素，以及分析消费信贷市场。第一个组成部分促进了对性别在宏观经济背景下的重要性的理解。这项研究的动机是指出认真对待妇女作为决策者的重要性的几点意见：(1)妇女权利与各国国内生产总值高度相关的事实。(2)在撒哈拉以南非洲国家，感染艾滋病毒的女性比男性多，这与美国和西欧相反，在那里，艾滋病毒主要是男性现象。(3)生育率与收入在横截面上呈负相关，但生育率差距随着国家的富裕而缩小。该项目通过汇编来自法律和历史来源的新证据，开发新的假设，并将理论作为数学模型来阐明这些观察结果。一种这样的新理论是，19世纪美国妇女合法权利的扩大在很大程度上是由于人力资本在这一时期日益重要。赋予妇女在家庭中更多的决策权可以增加对儿童人力资本的投资，从而加快一个国家的增长速度。了解妇女权利的历史演变对任何对当今发展中国家妇女地位感兴趣的人都很重要。这项关于艾滋病毒的工作探索了关于危险性行为的决定是如何做出的新理论。数值模拟分析了几种可能的干预措施，从而为政策制定者提供了一些指导。一般均衡模型允许纳入反馈效应(例如，通过包皮环切术降低感染风险可能导致更多的性行为，从而可能导致更大的流行率，从而可能导致更高的感染风险)，这些反馈效应对于给定政策的成功至关重要，但到目前为止在文献中基本上被忽略了。第二部分分析了美国消费信贷市场在过去三十年中的变化。将违约作为一种选择纳入消费和储蓄行为的生命周期模型，可以对消费者破产进行量化分析--自20世纪80年代初以来，消费者破产一直在上升。1996年，每年的个人破产数量超过了100万起，这导致了广泛的政策辩论，事实上还导致了2005年的法律修改。这项研究调查了金融领域的技术创新可能在多大程度上推动了这一增长。这项工作为分析信用合同成本的下降提供了一个新的理论框架，使人们能够更彻底地了解哪些消费者受益于信用卡的快速扩张。该项目的实证部分揭示了不同消费者在获得信贷和利率方面的分布变化。出现了几个新的事实(例如利率分布大幅扁平化)，这将成为未来消费信贷模式的重要组成部分。预计这些发现还将影响有关消费信贷市场监管的政策辩论。

The project comprises two different components: research on the macroeconomic consequences and determinants of gender roles and the analysis of consumer credit markets. The first component advances the understanding of the importance of gender in the macroeconomic context. The research is motivated by several observations pointing towards the importance of taking women as decision-makers seriously: (1) the fact that women's rights and GDP are highly correlated across countries. (2) The fact there are more women infected with HIV than men in Sub-Saharan African countries, contrary to the US and Western Europe where HIV is a largely male phenomenon. (3) The fact that fertility and income are negatively correlated in the cross-section, but that fertility gaps become smaller as a country grows richer. The project sheds light on these observations by compiling new evidence from legal and historical sources, developing new hypotheses, and formulating the theories as mathematical models. One such novel theory is that the extension of legal rights to women in the United States during the 19th Century was largely driven by the increased importance of human capital during this time period. Giving women more decision-making power in the family can increase investment in children's human capital and thereby accelerate the growth rate in a country. Understanding the historical evolution of women's rights will be important for anyone interested in the position of women in developing countries today. The work on HIV explores new theories on how decisions about risky sexual behavior are made. The numerical simulations analyze several possible interventions and thereby provide some guidance to policy-makers. The general equilibrium models allow the incorporation of feedback effects (for example that a decrease in the infection risk through circumcision may lead to more sexual activity and hence possibly a larger prevalence rate and thus a higher infection risk) which are crucial for the success of a given policy but have been largely ignored in the literature so far. The second component analyzes changes in consumer credit markets in the United States over the last three decades. Incorporating default as an option into life-cycle models of consumption and saving behavior allows a quantitative analysis of consumer bankruptcies-which have been on the rise since the early 1980s. In 1996, the annual number of personal bankruptcies crossed the 1 million threshold, which led to an extensive policy-debate and in fact to a change of the law in 2005. The research investigates to what extent technological innovation in the financial sector may have contributed to this rise. The work provides a new theoretical framework to analyze declines in the cost of credit contracts, which allows for a more thorough understanding of which consumers benefited from the rapid expansion of credit cards. The empirical part of the project sheds new light on changes in the distribution of access to credit and interest rates faced by different consumers. Several new facts emerge (such as a substantial flattening of the interest rate distribution), which will be an important ingredient into future models of consumer credit. These findings are also expected to shape the policy debate about regulation of the consumer credit market.