We’re delighted to announce that our next Stone Inequality Seminar will be featuring Maddie McKelway, an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Dartmouth College. McKelway will be presenting her paper, “The Power of Persuasion: Causal Effects of Household Communication on Women’s Employment.”
Abstract
While women often lack final say over household decisions, they may still provide input; their ability to communicate persuasively while doing so could allow them to sway household outcomes. We conduct a field experiment in rural India to evaluate an effective communication training among married women. We consider effects on women’s labor supply, the most common topic of intra-household disagreement in our sample. The treatment shifted women’s communication styles towards the techniques taught in the training. We find positive effects on labor supply for women who, at baseline, were more interested than their husbands in the women working. These effects persist at least one year post treatment. Mechanisms analyses suggest the labor supply effects are not due to shifts in bargaining power but rather from women changing their husbands’ preferences for female employment.
Event Details
Date: March 19, 2025
Time: 3:30 – 5:00 PM
Location: Iona 533, 6000 Iona Dr, Vancouver, BC
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Maddie McKelway is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Dartmouth College. Before joining Dartmouth, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s King Center on Global Development. Maddie received her PhD in economics from MIT in 2020. Her research is in development economics, and much of her work studies the empowerment and employment of women in India.