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This article analyzes the methodologies, scope, and impact of manuscripts submitted to and published in Feminist Economics from 1995 to 2019. The analysis finds that in addition to becoming increasingly empirical, Feminist Economics publications have also become increasingly intersectional. However, quantitative empirical submissions, relative to other methodological approaches, are more likely to be desk rejected and less likely to be eventually published if they proceed to peer review. The increasing attention to gender in the mainstream of the economics discipline, proxied by the prevalence of gender analyses in the discipline's top thirty journals, is also associated with increased desk rejection, reflecting a rise in submissions that take a mainstream "add gender and stir" approach. Ultimately, this study aims to understand how feminist economics has evolved since the inception of the journal and to spark conversation about how to continue to make the journal and economics more feminist in the future. HIGHLIGHTS Publications in Feminist Economics have become increasingly intersectional. Non-empirical work has been favored in the publication process. Special issue articles garner more citations on average. Intersectional articles garner fewer citations on average. More "gender" papers lacking feminist engagement have been submitted over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Macroeconomic models and associated policy analyses have long focused exclusively on market production, ignoring gender and care. Decades of feminist economic research, policy analysis, and activism around gender, care, and unpaid work have provided strong intellectual foundations for redressing this lacuna. This special issue represents the collaborative theoretical modeling work of a multidisciplinary group formed to respond to that gap. This introduction to the special issue situates this work in the wider gender and macroeconomics literature, beginning with some notes on the role of mathematical modeling in feminist economics. A key conclusion that emerges from this introductory review is that while some polices, especially greater public funding of care needs, can alleviate the inequities embedded in the gendered provision of care, more equitable and sustainable development and growth are unlikely to result without a transformation of the systems of gender stratification that underlie care provisioning. HIGHLIGHTS Macroeconomic models and policymaking should center the economic and social contributions of caregivers. Care and unpaid work are fundamental to the functioning of the market economy. A transformation of the systems of gender stratification that underlie care provisioning is needed. No single solution exists, but macroeconomic models of care provide steps toward fixing gender inequities in care provisioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do investments in social reproduction, or the time and commodities that it takes to produce and maintain the labor force, actually matter for the rate of economic growth? Using a Kaleckian macroeconomic model that incorporates gender and care provisioning, this article seeks to empirically evaluate this question. With panel data for a set of 121 countries between 1991 and 2015, the article uses principal component analysis to generate estimates of social reproduction regime by country, and then applies these estimates in growth regression analysis. Results indicate that the pressure on women's care time that comes with their increasing labor-force participation—absent strong social and more gender-egalitarian supports for care provisioning—compromises investment and growth. In economies where those supports for social reproduction exist, the increasingly outward-oriented and market-driven macro structures and policies that prevail across a variety of countries, including those associated with financialization, are shown to constrain investment in human capacities and long-run productivity growth. In mutual social reproduction regimes, greater gender equality in the labor market and in the distribution of responsibilities for care also stimulates economic growth, while regimes built on the exploitation of women's labor in these domains generate lower growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution evaluates whether affiliation with Islam is a theoretically and statistically robust proxy for patriarchal preferences when studying the relationship between gender inequality and economic growth. A crosscountry endogenous growth analysis shows that direct measures of patriarchal institutions dominate a variety of religious affiliation variables and model specifications in explaining country growth rates, and that using religious affiliation, particularly Islam, as a control for culture produces misleading conclusions. This result is robust to the inclusion of measures of gender inequality in education and income, indicating that establishing and maintaining patriarchal institutions (a process this study calls "patriarchal rentseeking") exact economic growth costs over and above those measured by standard gender inequality variables. One of the key contributions of this study is to draw on unique institutional data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Gender, Institutions and Development (GID) database to better understand the gendered dynamics of growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study embeds paid and unpaid care work in a structuralist macroeconomic model. Care work is formally modeled as a gendered input into the market production process via its impact on the current and future labor force, with altruistic motivations determining both how much support people give one another and the economic effectiveness of that support. This study uses the model to distinguish between two types of economies – a “selfish” versus an “altruistic” economy – and seeks to understand how different macroeconomic conditions and events play out in the two cases. Whether and how women and men share the financial and time costs of care condition the results of the comparison with more equal sharing of care responsibilities making the “altruistic” case more likely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the employment costs of inflation reduction in developing countries from a gender perspective. We explore two broad empirical questions: (1) what is the impact of inflation reduction on employment, and is the impact different for women and men, and (2) how are monetary policy indicators (e.g. real interest rates) connected to deflationary episodes and gender-specific employment effects? We find a common pattern among countries undergoing what we term contractionary inflation reduction, or periods of declining inflation that are accompanied by a loss of formal employment. After controlling for long-term employment trends, we find that the ratio of women's to men's employment tends to decline during these periods in the majority of countries examined. During the fewer periods of expansionary inflation reduction, however, there are no clear patterns to the relative changes in women's and men's employment. Maintaining competitive exchange rates seems to counterbalance the gender-biased effects of contractionary inflation reduction episodes, however. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the changing impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on gendered wages in urban China. Combining household survey data from 1995 and 2002 with province-level macro-data, the paper finds that FDI as a proportion of investment has a sizable and statistically significant positive effect on both female and male wages in both years. In 1995, women experienced larger gains from FDI than men, but those gender-based advantages had reversed by 2002, with men experiencing larger wage gains from FDI than women. The paper argues that these results reflect the shift of foreign-invested enterprises to higher productivity and more domestically oriented production, a shift that interacts with gender-based employment segregation to more greatly advantage workers in male-dominated than female-dominated industries. These findings indicate that FDI can have considerable structural effects on economies that reach beyond the particular workers and firms linked to foreign investors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Massachusetts, like many states across the country, is facing its worst fiscal crisis since World War II. The consensus among politicians and pundits is that the problem is the recession or, alternatively, "extravagant" state spending in the 1990s. But an analysis of state tax revenue data reveals that the major reason for the budget shortfall is legislated cuts in capital gains and personal income tax rates, along with declines in the yield of the corporate income tax. Without these tax cuts, the state would not be facing a budget crisis at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we use the logic of contractual relationships within the family to explore how technological change, distributional struggle, and collective action can help explain the relationship between economic development, fertility decline, and the emergence of more egalitarian marriages. We draw on the historical context of Great Britain and the U.S. between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to argue that the property rights afforded male household heads constituted a system of residual claimancy not unlike modern contractual relationships within the capitalist firm. Based upon these patriarchal property rights, we present a simple model of household decisions to allocate women's labor between productive and reproductive activities, comparing the outcomes of egalitarian and patriarchal governance and concluding that patriarchal governance may create incentives for men to force women to "overspecialize" in reproductive labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]