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Article Dans Une Revue Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization Année : 2021

Gender empowerment as an enforcer of individuals’ choice between education and fertility : Evidence from 19th century France

Résumé

Recent theoretical developments in growth models, triggered particularly by unified theories of growth, suggest that the child quantity-quality trade-off is a defining element in our explanation of a transition from Malthusian stagnation to a sustained growth path. This paper presents a model and derives a testable empirical framework to investigate the role of gender in the trade-off between education and fertility for 86 French counties during the 19th century. Endogeneity-mitigated mean-and median-based regressions offer robust empirical predictions for gender-empowered quantity-quality trade-off. In particular, we find the existence of a significant and negative association between education and fertility. Further, while gauging the differential effects of schooling on fertility, we find that the short-run differences between male and female are small whilst the long-run effects are large. From policy perspective, our results imply that for stable long-run growth it matters not just that parents educate their children, but specifically that they choose to educate girls.
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hal-03345562 , version 1 (15-09-2021)

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Claude Diebolt, Tapas Mishra, Faustine Perrin. Gender empowerment as an enforcer of individuals’ choice between education and fertility : Evidence from 19th century France. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2021, 188, pp.408-438. ⟨10.1016/j.jebo.2021.05.011⟩. ⟨hal-03345562⟩
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