Discussion Paper No. 3845

This paper uses age-at-school-entry policies to identify the effect of female education on fertility and infant health. We focus on sharp contrasts in schooling, fertility, and infant health between women born just before and after the school entry date. School entry policies affect female education and the quality of a woman’s mate and have generally small, but possibly heterogeneous, effects on fertility and infant health. We argue that school entry policies manipulate primarily the education of young women at risk of dropping out of school. (JEL I12, I21, J13, J16) Education is widely held to be a key determinant of fertility and infant health. From a theoretical perspective, several causal channels have been emphasized. First, education raises a woman’s permanent income through earnings, tilting her optimal fertility choices toward fewer offspring of higher quality (Gary S. Becker 1960; Jacob Mincer 1963; Becker and H. Gregg Lewis 1973; Robert J. Willis 1973). Second, under positive assortative mating, a woman’s education is causally connected to her mate’s education

Do students benefit from compulsory schooling? In an important article, Oreopoulos (2006) studied the 1947 British compulsory schooling law change and found large returns to schooling of about 15 % using the General Household Survey (GHS). We reanalyse this dataset and find much smaller returns of about 3 % on average. In fact, there is no evidence of any positive return for women and the return for men is in the 4-7 % range. Additionally, we utilize the New Earnings Survey Panel Data-set (NESPD) that has earnings information superior to that in the GHS and find instrumental variables estimates that are very similar: zero returns for women and returns of about 3 to 4 % for men. The authors acknowledge the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for granting access to the NESPD and the ONS and the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) for access to the General Household Survey data. Devereux gratefully acknowledges financial support

Black and Devereux gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National

In many developed countries a decline in fertility has occurred. This development has been attributed to greater education of women. However, establishing a causal link is difficult as both fertility and education have changed secularly. The contribution of this paper is to study the connection between fertility and education over a woman’s fertile period focusing on whether the relationship is causal. We study fertility in Norway and use an educational reform as an instrument to correct for selection into education. Our results indicate that increasing education leads to postponement of first births away from teenage motherhood towards having the first birth in their twenties and, for a smaller group, up to the age of 35-40. We do not find, however, evidence that total fertility falls as a result of greater education.

This paper provides experimental evidence on the relationship between education and early fertility in a developing country. We exploit experimental variation in the cost of education for a cohort of 18,000 students in Western Kenya. Students in Kenyan primary schools wear uniforms which typically cost about $6. In 163 schools randomly selected from among 328, students enrolled in grade 6 at baseline (2003) received free uniforms for the last three years of primary school (from 2003 to 2005). Girls in those schools were 2.4 percentages point less likely to drop out of primary school by 2005, and 4.5 percentage points more likely to have graduated from primary school by 2007. These effects correspond to changes of-13 percent and +9 percent, respectively. By the end of 2005, girls who received uniforms were 1.7 percentage points less likely to be married and 1.5 percentage points (10 percent) less likely to have started childbearing. The effects persisted after the end of the education subsidy: at the end of 2007, when most of these adolescents had left school, girls in the treatment group were still 2.6 percentage points (8 percent) less likely to have started childbearing. These results imply a surprisingly large impact of access to education of adolescent girls on early fertility, at least among girls who are likely to drop out of school.

We study in this paper the effect of mother‟s education on fertility and the schooling of children. We base our evidence on a natural experiment that increased sharply the education of affected cohorts of girls, but not of boys, as a result of the de facto revocation in October 1963 of the Military Government of Arabs in Israel which immediately eased for large part of the Arab population access to schooling institutions. The Military Government which was in effect from 1948 imposed severe restrictions on movement and travel and therefore disrupted access to schooling of residents in localities that lacked education institutions. The change in access to schools increased female years of schooling by 1.02 for women age 4-8 in 1964 and by 0.58 for women age 9-13 at that time while not effects boys education attainment. These very large effects on schooling levels led to a sharp decline in completed fertility, 0.61 children for the younger affected cohorts and of 0.47 children for the older cohorts. The implied 2SLS estimates show that an increase in one year of maternal schooling caused a decline in fertility of 0.5-0.6 children for the younger cohorts. Additional evidence that we present suggests that labor force participation, age when married, marriage and divorce rates as well as spouse's labor force participation and earnings did not play any role in this fertility decline. However, spouse's education increased sharply as well through assortative matching, therefore playing as well a role in the declining fertility. We also estimate that the increase in mother's schooling led as well to an increase in the education of children. The increase in schooling of children amounted to just over a third of the increase in schooling of their mothers.

Abstract By allowing for an extensive margin in the standard quantity-quality model, we generate new insights into fertility transitions. We test the model on Southern black women affected by a large-scale school construction program. Consistent with our model, women facing improved schooling opportunities for their children were more likely to have at least one child but chose to have smaller families overall. By contrast, women who themselves obtained more schooling due to the program delayed childbearing along both the extensive and intensive margins and entered higher quality occupations, consistent with education raising opportunity costs of child rearing. * Comments welcome at daaronson@frbchi.org,

This paper studies the effect of mothers ‘ education on fertility in a population with very low female labor force participation. The results we present are particularly relevant to many countries in the Muslim world where 70-80 percent of women are still out of the labor force. For identification we exploit the abrupt end of the military rule which greatly restricted the mobility of Arabs in Israel until the mid-1960's. This change improved access to schooling in communities that lacked schools and, as a consequence, significantly increased the education of affected cohorts, mainly of girls. The very large increase in schooling attainment triggered a sharp decline in completed fertility. We show that no other changes explain these findings and that the results are robust to checks against various threats to identification. We rule out convergence in fertility and schooling, changes in labor-force participation, age upon marriage, marriage and divorce rates, and spousal labor-force participation and earnings as mechanisms in this fertility decline. Spousal education increased however sharply through assortative matching and played a role in the fertility decline. We also show that the increase in mother‘s education was significantly and positively correlated with several potential mechanisms such as a reduction in the desired number of children, better knowledge and higher probability of using contraceptives, recognition that family size can compromise children quality, larger

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