Motherhood and Women’s Self-Employment: Theory and Evidence from Nigeria

Jean-Louis Bago and Sylvain E. Dessy

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2023, vol. 71, issue 3, 1003 - 1055

Abstract: The literature holds that having young children pushes women into self-employment to reconcile motherhood demands with their professional ambitions. However, knowledge gaps remain on how this effect differs by social context. Using nationally representative data from Nigeria, this paper demonstrates that motherhood has no statistically significant impact on women’s self-employment probabilities in a context where self-employment is predominantly informal and marriage creates extended family networks. Instead, after accounting for selection bias and the endogeneity of fertility and education decisions jointly, we find that lack of education drives up women’s self-employment probabilities in such a context. These findings are robust to alternative specifications.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/716322 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/716322 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/716322

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().