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

Victor Lavy*, Alexander Zablotsky

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

45 Scopus citations

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)105-121
Number of pages17
JournalJournal of Public Economics
Volume124
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Apr 2015

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015.

Keywords

  • Education
  • Fertility
  • Labor force participation

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Women's schooling and fertility under low female labor force participation: Evidence from mobility restrictions in Israel'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this