Estimating the effect of women's education on fertility during one of the most dramatic fertility transitions of the modern era.
How does an increase in women's educational attainment affect fertility decisions?
This chapter studies the relationship between female education and fertility in Iran, where fertility declined dramatically while women's educational attainment expanded substantially. The empirical challenge is that education is not randomly assigned: women with different levels of schooling may differ in many other characteristics that also influence fertility.
The analysis combines large-scale Iranian census microdata with a newly constructed dataset documenting the expansion of elementary and secondary schools across regions and cohorts.
The census data provide information on educational attainment, fertility outcomes, demographic characteristics, and geographic location. Linking these observations to historical variation in access to schooling creates the foundation for the empirical identification strategy.
A central challenge is the endogeneity of education. Simply comparing women with more and less schooling would not necessarily identify the causal effect of education on fertility.
The empirical strategy exploits geographic and cohort variation in exposure to the expansion of girls' elementary and secondary schools as a source of variation in educational attainment.
This instrumental-variable framework uses differences in access to schooling during school-age years to isolate variation in education associated with educational infrastructure rather than relying only on observed differences between more- and less-educated women.
The analysis considers several dimensions of fertility behavior, including the number of children, childlessness, having only one child, and having more than one child. Urban and rural populations are examined separately to capture meaningful differences across economic and geographic environments.
The empirical results indicate that greater educational attainment is associated with lower fertility. Additional education reduces the number of children and increases the likelihood of remaining childless or having only one child in both urban and rural areas.
The broader implication is that the returns to women's education extend beyond wages and employment. Educational expansion can also generate substantial demographic and social effects.