Efficiency and gender stereotypes: applications to household resource allocation and educational choices.

Summary This thesis is devoted to the study of decision-making within couples and the analysis of educational choices by gender. To date, economic models offer a better understanding of these decisions, but fail to explain gender differences in their entirety. Indeed, traditional economic variables do not fully represent the allocation of time between partners, and human capital models fail to explain why girls choose lower paying educational paths. The first chapter of this thesis will then seek to better understand the determinants of "who gets what" in the couple, in terms of monetary resources and time. Then a second chapter will look at the production sphere of the household, by confronting the efficiency hypothesis to the time allocation choices in couples. It turns out that this hypothesis seems to be challenged at the level of the household production process. But how can we then represent behavior? It might be judicious to try to represent a second-order optimum, integrating social constraints or representations, and more particularly gender stereotypes or differentiated beliefs in society regarding the skills of men and women. The third chapter thus analyses the impact on educational choices of different beliefs about the skills of girls and boys in science and humanities. The final chapter examines the impact of gender stereotypes, this time concerning men's and women's skills in producing household goods.