Alessandra Voena, PhD

 

Post-Doctoral Fellow,

Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University

 

Assistant Professor, Department of Economics,

The University of Chicago (starting July 2012)

 

 

 

 

79 John F. Kennedy Street, Mailbox 81

Cambridge, MA 02138  - USA

Phone: +1 (650) 391-5440

Email: ale.voena [at] gmail.com

 

 

CV

 

 

Working papers and publications

 

 

Yours, Mine and Ours: Do Divorce Laws Affect the Intertemporal Behavior of Married Couples? [link]

 

Divorce laws regulate when divorce is allowed and establish each spouse's property rights over household assets. This paper examines how such laws affect the intertemporal behavior and the welfare of married couples. I build a dynamic model of household choice in which moving from a mutual consent to a unilateral divorce regime results in limited commitment and renegotiation of intra-household allocations. I estimate the key parameters of the model by exploiting panel variation in U.S. divorce laws across states from the late 1960s to the 1990s. In states that imposed an equal division of property, couples responded to unilateral divorce by increasing savings about 20% more than in states in which assets were retained by the spouse who had formal title to the property, suggesting that equal division may have been costly for primary earners. Furthermore, wives responded to unilateral divorce by temporarily reducing their employment by more than 5 percentage points, only in states in which the division of property was equal. These findings indicate that the threat of unilateral divorce and the leverage provided by the equal division of property allowed wives to appropriate a larger share of household resources (consumption and leisure). My estimates also suggest that equal division of property benefited divorcing women when it was first introduced, since they had a smaller share of resources in marriage and thus less assets in their name than their husbands. However, counterfactual experiments indicate that the equal division of property may be detrimental to women who consume as much as their husbands in marriage, but have lower wages. When spouses consume approximately equal amounts, secondary earners are better off under a separate property regime because they may need more savings than the breadwinners to smooth consumption when going into a divorce.

 

 

Compulsory Licensing: Evidence from the Trading-with-the Enemy Act (with Petra Moser), The American Economic Review, forthcoming [link to working paper version]

 

Compulsory licensing allows firms in developing countries to produce foreign-owned inventions without the consent of foreign patent owners. This paper uses an exogenous event of compulsory licensing after World War I under the Trading with the Enemy Act to examine the effects of compulsory licensing on domestic invention. Difference-in-differences analyses of nearly 130,000 chemical inventions suggest that compulsory licensing increased domestic invention by at least 20 percent.

 

 

German-Jewish migrs and U.S. Invention (with Petra Moser and Fabian Waldinger) [link]

 

After Hitler took power in 1933, scientists who had at least one Jewish grandparent were dismissed from German universities.  Many of them moved to the United States; their patents make it possible to trace narrowly identified research fields in which U.S. invention benefited from the arrival of German-Jewish migrs.  Difference-in-differences analyses compare changes in U.S. patenting in research fields of migrs with fields of other German chemists, who did not move to the United States.  These analyses suggest that U.S. invention increased by 30 percent in fields that benefited from the arrival of an migr.  Instrumental variable regressions that use the pre-1933 research fields of dismissed chemists as an instrument for the research fields of migr chemists suggest that selection may have been negative, so that OLS understates the migrs effects on U.S. invention.

 

 

The Economics and Politics of Womens Rights (with Matthias Doepke and Michle Tertilt), The Annual Review of Economics, forthcoming  [link to working paper version]

 

Women's rights and economic development are highly correlated. Today, the discrepancy between the legal rights of women and men is much larger in developing compared to developed countries. Historically, even in countries that are now rich women had few rights before economic development took off. Is development the cause of expanding women's rights, or conversely, do women's rights facilitate development? We argue that there is truth to both hypotheses. The literature on the economic consequences of women's rights documents that more rights for women lead to more spending on health and children, which should benefit development. The political economy literature on the evolution of women's rights finds that technological change increased the costs of patriarchy for men, and thus contributed to expanding women's rights. Combining these perspectives, we discuss the theory of Doepke and Tertilt (2009), where an increase in the return to human capital induces men to vote for women's rights, which in turn promotes growth in human capital and income per capita.