I examine why the harmful tradition of female genital mutilation (FGM) persists in certain countries but in others it has been eradicated. People are more willing to abandon their traditions if they are confident that the government is durable enough to set up long-term replacements for them. Using a country-ethnicity panel data set spanning 23 countries from 1970 to 2013 and artificial partition of African ethnic groups by national borders, I show that a one-standard-deviation larger increase in political regime durability leads to a 0.1-standard-deviation larger decline in the share of newly circumcised women, conditional on the presence of an anti-FGM government policy.

Using full count US census data, we study the impact of early twentieth-century state-industry-specific minimum wage laws that primarily targeted female employees. Our triple-difference estimates suggest a null impact of the minimum wage laws, potentially reflecting disemployment effects and the positive selection bias of the workers remaining in the labor force. When comparing county-industry trends between counties straddling state borders, female employment is lower by around 3.1% in affected county-industry cells. We further investigate the implications for own-wage elasticity of labor demand as a function of cross-industry concentration, the channels of substitution between men and women, and heterogeneity by marital status.