Gender bias and central bank policy: employment and inflation reduction

Elissa Braunstein () and James Heintz

International Review of Applied Economics, 2008, vol. 22, issue 2, 173-186

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: gender; monetary policy; inflation; employment; Central Banks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02692170801889643 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:irapec:v:22:y:2008:i:2:p:173-186

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CIRA20

DOI: 10.1080/02692170801889643

Access Statistics for this article

International Review of Applied Economics is currently edited by Professor Malcolm Sawyer

More articles in International Review of Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().