Women’s liberation as a financial innovation
Consider the perverse incentives that coverture created. It could have already been imprudent for an individual woman to put profit a bank, or even to hold any other asset except real property, because her husband to be would you need to it from her. Parents who wished to give their daughters gifts or bequests could have been equally hesitant to place profit a bank, and could have used property instead.
Less overall deposited in banks would also imply that less overall was lent by banks, an unfortunate outcome through the industrial revolution. We study the implications for financial markets on growth, but Kahn (1996) also discovered that women’s property rights resulted in further patenting by women while Geddes et al. (2012) discovered that these rights resulted in further investment in girls’ education. In some papers, Koudijs and Salisbury (2016, 2018) and Koudijs et al. (2018) studied the consequences of laws that exempted a married woman’s assets from her husband’s creditors, on risk taking, and marital sorting.
Married women received property rights in america state-by-state (Geddes and Lueck 2002), that allows us to compare economic outcomes in states that granted rights to the ones that didn’t. Massachusetts (1846) was the first state to provide women rights. By 1920 all but four states had followed suit.