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Title: Women's Bargaining Power and the Pill

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2017

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Abstract: We study the effects of the introduction of oral contraception (The Pill) on the household bargaining position of women. We exploit the variation in state obscenity laws based on the Comstock Act of 1879 that limited the availability of the Pill in a set of states. These bans on the sales of the Pill were repealed in 1965 by the Supreme Court decision Griswold vs. Connecticut which allowed married women to have access to the Pill nationwide. We use data from the Consumer Expenditures Survey in 1960 and 1972, and we consider shares of income spent on various goods as proxies for a womans bargaining power. Across a wide variety of goods, we find evidence that access to oral contraception reduced married womens bargaining power in the household. For example, in states with a ban on contraception, food away spending shares, a common proxy for womens bargaining power, are 0.5 percentage points higher than in states without a ban, an approximately 12.5% increase from the mean share in 1972. Similar effects, consistent with reduced female bargaining power, are present for total food, tobacco, and mens clothing. In 1972, the Supreme Court in the case of Eisenstadt v. Baird extended the right to use contraception to all women, married or unmarried. Using the 1980 CEX, we find no evidence that this decision reversed these effects and increased womens bargaining power as predicted by the model of Chiappori and Oreffice (2008).

Url: http://www.auburn.edu/~dza0013/pill_bargaining.pdf

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Authors: Altindag, Duha T; Ziebarth, Nicolas L

Publisher: Auburn University

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Fertility and Mortality, Other

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