TY - JOUR
T1 - Women's schooling and fertility under low female labor force participation
T2 - Evidence from mobility restrictions in Israel
AU - Lavy, Victor
AU - Zablotsky, Alexander
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015.
PY - 2015/4/1
Y1 - 2015/4/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Education
KW - Fertility
KW - Labor force participation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84939961707&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2015.02.009
DO - 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2015.02.009
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AN - SCOPUS:84939961707
SN - 0047-2727
VL - 124
SP - 105
EP - 121
JO - Journal of Public Economics
JF - Journal of Public Economics
ER -