Misperceived Social Norms: Female Labor Force Participation in Saudi Arabia / Leonardo Bursztyn, Alessandra L. González, David Yanagizawa-Drott.

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Bursztyn, Leonardo

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TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w24736.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2018.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: Through the custom of guardianship, husbands typically have the final word on their wives' labor supply decisions in Saudi Arabia, a country with very low female labor force participation (FLFP). We provide incentivized evidence (both from an experimental sample in Riyadh and from a national sample) that the vast majority of young married men in Saudi Arabia privately support FLFP outside of home from a normative perspective, while they substantially underestimate the level of support for FLFP by other similar men - even men from their same social setting, such as their neighbors. We then show that randomly correcting these beliefs about others increases married men's willingness to let their wives join the labor force (as measured by their costly sign-up for a job-matching service for their wives). Finally, we find that this decision maps onto real outcomes: four months after the main intervention, the wives of men in our original sample whose beliefs about acceptability of FLFP were corrected are more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job outside of home. Together, our evidence indicates a potentially important source of labor market frictions, where job search is underprovided due to misperceived social norms.

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Previous	nber w24733 Immigration and Redistribution /	nber w24734 Microeconomic Heterogeneity and Macroeconomic Shocks /	nber w24735 The Factor Content of Equilibrium Exchange Rates /	nber w24736 Misperceived Social Norms: Female Labor Force Participation in Saudi Arabia /	nber w24737 Bank Resolution and the Structure of Global Banks /	nber w24738 The Changing (Dis-)Utility of Work /	nber w24739 Choked By Red Tape? The Political Economy of Wasteful Trade Barriers /	Next

June 2018.

Through the custom of guardianship, husbands typically have the final word on their wives' labor supply decisions in Saudi Arabia, a country with very low female labor force participation (FLFP). We provide incentivized evidence (both from an experimental sample in Riyadh and from a national sample) that the vast majority of young married men in Saudi Arabia privately support FLFP outside of home from a normative perspective, while they substantially underestimate the level of support for FLFP by other similar men - even men from their same social setting, such as their neighbors. We then show that randomly correcting these beliefs about others increases married men's willingness to let their wives join the labor force (as measured by their costly sign-up for a job-matching service for their wives). Finally, we find that this decision maps onto real outcomes: four months after the main intervention, the wives of men in our original sample whose beliefs about acceptability of FLFP were corrected are more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job outside of home. Together, our evidence indicates a potentially important source of labor market frictions, where job search is underprovided due to misperceived social norms.