Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Economics
First Advisor
Humphries, John Eric
Abstract
In the first chapter, I identify a gender promotion gap among judges in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, and characterize its labor-demand and labor-supply-related drivers. To do so, I construct a novel dataset that measures characteristics, skills, and observable performance on the job and the process of career advancement. Women take significantly longer to be promoted within the Trial Court and, consequently, acquire less experience with larger court districts. At the end of their career, they are four times less likely than men to reach the Appeals Court. On the labor supply side, women are 14% less likely to seek career advancement within the Trial Court, which accounts for 40% of the gender promotion gap at this stage. On the labor demand side, another 41% of this gap can be explained by a differential probability of receiving a promotion when applying. Among applicants for merit-based promotions, female candidates are 21% less likely to be successful than their male counterparts. This effect is not explained by an observable difference in skills at the time of hiring or productivity on the job. In the second chapter, Vitor Possebom and I investigate the impact of judges' gender on the outcome of domestic violence cases. We use data from criminal cases in São Paulo, Brazil, between 2011 and 2019, which are randomly allocated to judges within a court district. We compare conviction rates by judge's gender and find that a domestic violence case assigned to a female judge is 31% (10 p.p) more likely to result in conviction than a case assigned to a male judge with similar career characteristics. To show that this decision gap rises due to different gender perspectives about domestic violence instead of rising due to female judges being tougher than male judges, we compare it against gender conviction rate gaps in similar types of crimes. We find that the gender conviction rate gap for domestic violence cases is significantly larger than the same gap for other misdemeanor cases (3 p.p. larger) and for other physical assault cases (8 p.p. larger). Lastly, we identify two channels that drive this gender conviction rate gap for domestic violence cases: gender identity and gender-based differences in evidence interpretation.
Recommended Citation
Laneuville Teixeira Garcia, Helena, "Essays in Gender Economics" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1411.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1411
