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Ricardo Hausmann

How Afghanistan Was Really Lost

How Afghanistan Was Really Lost

November 9, 2021

The West’s failure in Afghanistan may well have resulted from not spending enough money in the right places. A different balance between US military expenditure and economic aid might have convinced ordinary Afghans that they had a significant stake in the success of the state that the US and its allies were striving to build.

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Ganguli, Ina, Ricardo Hausmann, and Martina Viarengo. “Schooling Can’t Buy Me Love: Marriage, Work, and the Gender Education Gap in Latin America”. CID Working Paper (2010). Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
schooling_cant.pdf

In this paper we establish six stylized facts related to marriage and work in Latin America and present a simple model to account for them. First, skilled women are less likely to be married than unskilled women. Second, skilled women are less likely to be married than skilled men. Third, married skilled men are more likely to work than unmarried skilled men, but married skilled women are less likely to work than unmarried skilled women. Fourth, Latin American women are much more likely to marry a less skilled husband compared to women in other regions of the world. Five, when a skilled Latin American woman marries down, she is more likely to work than if she marries a more or equally educated man. Six, when a woman marries down, she tends to marry the “better” men in that these are men that earn higher wages than those explained by the other observable characteristics. We present a simple game theoretic model that explains these facts with a single assumption: Latin American men, but not women, assign a greater value to having a stay-home wife.

Ganguli, Ina, Ricardo Hausmann, and Martina Viarengo. “Closing the Gender Gap in Education: What is the State of Gaps in Labor Force Participation for Women, Wives and Mothers?”. International Labour Review (2014). Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
closing_gap_education.pdf
The education gap between men and women has closed, or has even reversed in many countries. Have countries also made progress in closing other gaps facing women? Using micro-level Census data for close to 40 countries, we examine several dimensions of gender disparity: we compare men and women's labor force participation (the labor force participation gap), married and single women's labor force participation (the marriage gap), and mothers' and non-mother's labor force participation (the motherhood gap). We show that there is significant heterogeneity among countries in terms of the size and the speed at which the gaps are changing.
Ganguli, Ina, Ricardo Hausmann, and Martina Viarengo. “Marriage, education and assortative mating in Latin America”. Applied Economics Letters 21.12 (2014): , 21, 12, 806-811. Web. Publisher's VersionAbstract
marriage_education.pdf

In this article, we establish facts related to marriage and education in Latin American countries. Using census data from IPUMS International, we show how marriage and assortative mating patterns have changed from 1980 to 2000 and how the patterns in Latin America compare to the United States. We find that in Latin American countries, highly educated individuals are less likely to be married than the less educated, and the pattern is stronger for women. We also show that while it has been increasing over time, there is less positive assortative mating in Latin America than in the United States.