Children’s Educational Enrollment and Maternal Labor
Clemente Pignatti and
Alessandro Tondini
No 2025-01, FBK-IRVAPP Working Papers from Research Institute for the Evaluation of Public Policies (IRVAPP), Bruno Kessler Foundation
Abstract:
We investigate the impact of a reform in South Africa anticipating children’s entry into primary school on children’s school enrollment and mothers’ labour supply. We use Census data and exploit month-of-birth discontinuities and the before/after variation introduced by the reform. We report a net increase of 7pp. in school attendance at age 5. However, contrary to an established finding in the literature, we find no impact on mother’s employment and the type of jobs held. We reconcile our finding with those of previous studies by noting that South Africa is characterized by relatively high initial rates of school attendance and relatively low rates of maternal employment. In districts where these contextual factors are more similar to previous studies, we find that higher enrollment does lead to higher maternal employment.
Keywords: Childcare; Maternal labor supply; South Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I28 J13 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://irvapp.fbk.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/WP_IRVAPP_2025-01.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fbk:wpaper:2025-01
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in FBK-IRVAPP Working Papers from Research Institute for the Evaluation of Public Policies (IRVAPP), Bruno Kessler Foundation Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alessio Tomelleri () and Daniela Anesi ().