Thrilled to be working with an amazing team of researchers from Fundación Capital, IDB, GRADE & McGill on a project to understand how gender norms act as a barrier for women-led businesses in Paraguay & what policy makers can do about it. Read what our awesome co-author Laura Morínigo writes abt it.
McGill’s Arts Building on campus, featuring its stone façade and green dome, with the McGill flag raised and autumn foliage surrounding the building.
McGill is recruiting top-tier researchers working abroad through the federally funded Canada Impact+ Research Chairs program, addressing global and national challenges. The first round is due in early 2026.
Learn more and submit your candidacy: https://mcgill.ca/x/5Zh
Come join us at McGill! We are recruiting top-tier researchers working abroad.
I wish you luck with that
Horrific and evil.
‘Come North!’ Canada Makes Play for H-1B Visa Holders With New Talent Drive www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/w...
Gorgeous!
Lucky! You got snow! Send it our way please 🙏 (speaking for a minority)
Thank you!
And a shout out to my formidable co-authors Lorena Alcázar, @franquegrimard.bsky.social, Andrea Ulloa, Tamara Pressman
🙌
I'll be presenting this paper on Thursday Nov 20 at 10:30 #LACEA2025 in Recife, in case you are interested.
Link to paper: bit.ly/43Cso1R
Thanks for reading if you made it this far!😊
➡️ In summary, in this working paper, we find evidence of significant norms misperceptions, that these misperceptions are stronger among women when the reference group is male, and that gender norms influence the division of household labour.
However, we find that men are more likely to report being responsible for routine tasks if they believe their male peers are more progressive – and not whether they themselves hold progressive beliefs.
Indeed, domestic chores are highly gendered, with women bearing the majority of the responsibility for routine chores such as cleaning, cooking, and childcare. Women’s time allocated to these chores is influenced by their own beliefs rather than common beliefs.
While gender norms beliefs do not appear to influence how men allocate their time between market and domestic work, their beliefs do influence who assumes responsibility for different domestic tasks within the household.
➡️ Second, we find that gender norms influence time allocation, with more progressive women spending less time in domestic chores and more time in leisure, but have little relationship with labour force participation at the intensive and extensive margins.
Most strikingly, while both men and women believe other women are more conservative than women actually are, women greatly misperceive men’s beliefs:
We found some interesting results.
➡️ First, male and female participants in our study do not differ much in their own beliefs about gender norms, and more educated individuals tend to have more progressive beliefs. However, both men and women tend to overstate how conservative others are.
1️⃣ What do women and men believe about social norms and do these beliefs vary across reference groups?
2️⃣ Do they form accurate beliefs about what others’ think about gender norms?
3️⃣ Do these beliefs correlate with the division of labour within the household?
We elicited individual and common beliefs about gender norms in three domains (labour supply, leisure and domestic work) using a lab-in-the-field experiment with 500 participants from low-income neighbourhoods in Lima, Peru, to try to answer three questions.
💥New Working Paper!💥 Women in Peru🇵🇪 spend 3 to 4 hours per day more than men in unpaid domestic and care work, regardless of their labour force participation. With colleagues @mcgill.ca and GRADE, we wanted to see whether beliefs about gender norms could help explain this pattern.
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Now out in open access: "Aspirational Iconography: The European Union Flag as an Extraterritorial Political Symbol”
doi.org/10.1080/2469.... Ben Forest and I explain why people fly “foreign” flags and why such displays can evoke powerful emotional reactions, both positive and negative.
Excited to get to welcome Steven Levitsky to McGill to kick off our first annual conference on democratic studies led by the new Diamond-Brown Professor Juan Pablo Luna.
I can't say it better than my colleagues -- apply to join our Economics Department @mcgill.ca.
We are hiring and looking especially for Econometrics and IO.
Big congratulations to this year’s Nobel Prize winners — including our very own @mcgillarts.bsky.social alum, Peter Howitt (BA Honours Economics)! #NobelPrize #McGillProud
reporter.mcgill.ca/peter-howitt...
Meanwhile, some big departures from MIT announced today
www.news.uzh.ch/en/articles/...
And it’s a wrap! #SMOQK 2025 at Concordia - 5 excellent papers in development economics. What a great community we have in the Sherbrooke Montreal Ottawa Quebec and Kingston area. See you again in a year!
And another set of amazing papers for the afternoon with @cmichaudleclerc.bsky.social (Laval), Zemar Hakim (Queens), and @caitbrownecon.bsky.social (Laval) #SMOQK2025
