Free Primary Education, Fertility, and Women’s Access to the Labor Market

This article investigates the causal relationship between women’s schooling and fertility by exploiting variation generated by the removal of school fees in Ethiopia. The increase in schooling caused by the reform is identified using both geographic variation in the intensity of its impact and temporal variation generated by the timing of the implementation. The model finds that the removal of school fees led to an increase in schooling for Ethiopian women and that each additional year of schooling led to a reduction in fertility. An investigation of the underlying mechanisms linking schooling and fertility finds that the decline in fertility is associated with an increase in labor market opportunity and a reduction in women’s ideal number of children.

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Chicoine, Luke
Format: Journal Article biblioteca
Language:en_US
Published: Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank 2020-01-03
Subjects:FREE PRIMARY EDUCATION, RETURNS TO SCHOOLING, FERTILITY, ETHIOPIA,
Online Access:https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/40810
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