We study gender gaps across two central domains of household finance: stock market participation and mortgage borrowing and refinancing. Using rich microdata, we show that these gaps are small among lower-income, less-educated households but widen sharply at higher socioeconomic status, with women participating less in the stock market, borrowing on less favorable terms, and refinancing less optimally than comparable men. Financial literacy grounded in quantitative reasoning explains much of this gradient. Leveraging within-family sibling comparisons, we trace the gaps to childhood differences in math skills and math-related attitudes shaped by persistent gender stereotypes.

This paper investigates the effect of property rights on financial inclusion and subsequent changes in labor market participation and human capital investment. Using hand-collected savings bank data linked to the English census, I exploit the 1870 Married Women's Property Act, which granted married women ownership of their financial assets. A 10% increase in the population of married women is associated with a 1% rise in accounts and a 1.2% rise in deposit receipts after the reform, indicating greater financial inclusion. In districts with a savings bank, following the reform, female employment increases by ∼3 pp for married women and ∼6 pp for single women, with no change for men. The occupational structure shifts, with married women moving toward low-entry-cost work and single women moving into higher-skill roles that require greater human capital. Girls' school attendance rises by 9-12%, with no change for boys. These patterns align with an appropriability channel in which greater control over earnings raises the private return to work and skill investment, with savings banks making property rights operative by providing secure, interest-bearing deposits. I develop a theoretical framework emphasizing this complementarity between reduced expropriation risk and enforceable, remunerated savings. These results demonstrate an important role of property rights in encouraging financial participation, and the complementarity of property rights and financial access in employment and education outcomes.

BigTech firms increasingly integrate financial services into their platform ecosystems, raising a central question: how this integration affects firms’ core business activity. Using a large-scale field experiment at one of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms (over 2.5 million individual-month observations), we estimate the causal effects of marginal expansions in access to embedded credit. We find that credit access increases user economic activity—raising intensity and persistence, stabilizing demand, and expanding consumption scope—with little evidence of consumption upgrading or increased delinquency. Our results show that embedded credit reinforces the platform’s core operations, highlighting complementarities in modern digital ecosystems.