Examining how higher education and fertility shape women's participation in the labor market.
How do higher education and fertility affect women's labor force participation?
This chapter examines two important determinants of female labor supply: educational attainment and fertility. Both decisions are potentially endogenous, making simple comparisons between women with different levels of education or different numbers of children difficult to interpret causally.
The analysis uses a large sample of repeated cross-sectional census microdata covering Iranian women across multiple census years.
The data contain information on labor force participation, education, fertility, demographic characteristics, and geographic location, allowing the analysis to examine differences across regions and population groups.
Education and fertility may both be correlated with unobserved characteristics that also affect employment decisions. The empirical strategy therefore uses instrumental variables to address these sources of endogeneity.
Geographic variation in access to universities is used as an instrument for higher education, while variation related to child-gender composition and preferences is used to instrument fertility.
These strategies are designed to isolate sources of variation in education and fertility that are distinct from the underlying characteristics that may simultaneously influence women's labor force participation.
The results show a strong positive relationship between higher education and female labor force participation. The estimated effects are substantial in both the northern and southern regions examined in the analysis.
The estimated effect of higher education on female labor force participation is considerably stronger than the relationship between fertility and labor force participation in the empirical results.
These findings highlight the importance of educational attainment in understanding women's economic participation and illustrate how education policy can have consequences extending beyond schooling itself.