Women's schooling and fertility under low female labor force participation: Evidence from mobility restrictions in Israel

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lavy, Victor; Zablotsky, Alexander
• 署名单位: University of Warwick; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2015.02.009
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 105-121
• 关键词: fertility; education; labor force participation

摘要

This paper studies the effect of mothers' education on fertility in a mostly Muslim population with very low female labor force participation. We first show that a removal of travel restrictions on Israeli Arabs had raised female education and had almost no effect on male education. Next, we show that it lowered fertility rates among exposed women, which we interpret as an effect of female education on fertility. We rule out labor-force participation, age at marriage, marriage and divorce rates and spousal labor-force participation and earnings as confounding factors or as mechanisms but find that spousal education and children quality play a role in the fertility decline. We provide a variety of robustness tests that rule out other channels by which the removal of the travel restrictions could have affected fertility directly. These results are particularly interesting and important for the context of many Muslim countries with low rates of female labor force participation. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.