As part of our interview series, we ask renowned experts in the field about the future of research in development economics, and for their advice for young researchers. For this interview, we got the opportunity to talk to Prof. Deniz Sanin.
Deniz Sanin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of South Carolina. Her research examines how laws, labor markets and social norms shape women’s employment and domestic violence.
ETRM: What inspired you to follow your research agenda on gender inequality, women’s economic opportunities, and domestic violence?
Deniz: When I started my PhD, domestic violence was not in my head as a topic. I was more interested in education and labor topics. I always wanted to do development, but I didn’t know exactly what to do in development. A part of me was always interested in female labor supply.
That interest started when I was an undergraduate. In my first econometrics course, we had a short homework, supposed to be one paragraph, on a regression of wages on education, and I ended up writing eight pages. It made me think beyond how education affects wages: if it’s women’s education, what happens within the family? I didn’t know anything about the research on family economics or female labor supply at the time, I hadn’t read Claudia Goldin yet, but I became very interested in those questions.
There was also a personal side to that interest. I grew up in Turkey, in a household where education was important, and both my mom and dad worked. But because of gender norms, I remember people making comments about my mom working. No one made those comments about my dad. So female labor supply was always a big thing in my life. I looked up to my mom, an academic, and grew up believing that education and having a job can be a source of power for women.
During the second year of my PhD, I started reading papers on female empowerment and domestic violence, including work by Siwan Anderson and my dissertation advisor Garance Genicot, Bilge Erten and Pinar Keskin, and Anna Aizer. What interested me was how mixed the results were. In the U.S., you could see a decrease in domestic violence when women were empowered through laws or female labor supply, while in developing-country contexts you could see male backlash or extractive violence.
I remember being very angry at those results. I thought, “No, it should not.” From my perspective, education and female labor supply were things that could empower women. So I wanted to find a natural experiment and see whether female labor supply had an effect on domestic violence. And if violence increased, I wanted to understand the mechanism behind it.
ETRM: You mentioned that you were on a quest to find a natural experiment. How did it go?
Deniz: The quest was very hard. During the third year of my PhD at Georgetown, I was working on a law in Rwanda where domestic violence became grounds for fault divorce. I knew there were very detailed administrative hospital records in Rwanda, and I was in the process of getting those, as it took years. But deep inside, I really wanted my job market paper to be on a natural experiment where there was variation in female labor supply.
I was searching for it but couldn’t find it. Then one day during my fourth year, while I was editing my paper on domestic violence laws, I went to the Starbucks at Georgetown and saw premium Rwandan coffee. I remember thinking: I’m in the middle of Washington, D.C., Rwanda is a very small country, so how is Rwandan coffee being sold even in this small Starbucks? I Googled it and found that there had been a coffee boom.
Then my advisor recommended a recent Quarterly Journal of Economics paper by Rocco Macchiavello and Ameet Morjaria on the coffee mills and relational contracts in Rwanda. Their focus was not female labor supply, but I realized that there are tasks inside the mills that are female-dominated. That’s where I thought, I have my variation.
For me, there was an important lesson in that. I had already read a lot of the literature and knew that I wanted to find variation related to female labor supply. That made me look at what was happening around me through the lens of what I had read. It still took a long time to get the data and combine everything, but recognizing the natural experiment when I saw it came from that reading. And it really was in Starbucks.
ETRM: When you’re thinking about new projects or research questions, do you have a process for coming up with those questions?
Deniz: What I realized about myself is that I look for a context where there has been a big change and where I’m genuinely interested in understanding the effect.
Take the coffee mill expansion. You could have someone who had spent her whole life working unpaid, and then, because of the coffee mill expansion and international trade, she was suddenly working for pay. That’s a very big change. Even if there was no change in domestic violence, going from having no personal income to working for pay could have important effects, and I wanted to understand what happens after a change like that.
The same idea applies to my current domestic violence paper, ‘When Do Domestic Violence Laws Work?’. In Uganda, women who wanted to get divorced had to refund the bride price, even to leave a violent marriage, but many didn’t have the means to do that. In 2015, the refund requirement was abolished. When the Supreme Court changes a long-standing custom that involves a large share of household income, that’s a very big change for me, and I want to understand its effect.
Then I think about the data. Are there good administrative data? Good self-reported household surveys? Are there different datasets that let me analyze the change in a granular way? For Uganda, I chased the Uganda Police Force data for three years straight, and I recently got the universe of domestic violence crime records.
I’m not saying natural experiments are the only way, I will also be doing a field experiment. But for me, a powerful context and rich data can do a lot of the heavy lifting. Of course, I cannot compromise on identification. If there’s a bad pre-trend, things basically drop. That’s what I give importance to: the context, the available data, and whether there is a clean identification strategy.
ETRM: What advice would you give to a young researcher beginning their research career?
Deniz: I’m big on reading literature. During my second year, one of my committee members, Mary Ann Bronson, told me that for any topic you’re interested in, someone has probably written a review paper on it. Start there.
I remember reading Esther Duflo’s review article, ‘Women’s Empowerment and Economic Development’. I would put a star next to every paper that I wanted to dig deeper into and ask: What’s the identification strategy? What’s the context? What’s the contribution? I would make a reading list from the review paper and then go through the topics and ideas that interested me.
Review papers also helped me see what was missing and what the next research questions could be. I think it’s important to read a paper from the perspective of: What’s the contribution, and what’s the gap? We have a tendency to focus just on the identification and the result. But if someone has made this contribution, what’s the next step? Sometimes it can be low-hanging fruit. Sometimes it’s just a question where someone says A, another person says B, but is it A or B, or is it maybe C?
ETRM: Thanks for your time!
