Compulsory education and gender gaps in intrahousehold empowerment

Shengnan Ma ()
Additional contact information
Shengnan Ma: Anhui University of Finance & Economics

Review of Economics of the Household, 2025, vol. 23, issue 1, No 7, 195-224

Abstract: Abstract This paper estimates the effects of China’s 1986 Compulsory Education Law (CEL) on gender gaps in intrahousehold empowerment. The analysis uses a province-level dataset compiled from the population census and woman social status with a cohort difference-in-differences empirical strategy. This paper finds that the exposure to CEL had a positive impact on egalitarian intrahousehold decision making. It also increased the likelihood with which respondents reported perceiving egalitarian empowerment within the household. Additional evidence on mechanisms suggests that the results are due to exposure to CEL fostering earnings of female respondents and egalitarian gender attitudes of all respondents, as well as altering the family characteristics in terms of marriage age and husband’s schooling of female respondents.

Keywords: Compulsory education; Cohort DID; Gender equality; Intrahousehold empowerment; D13; D14; I21; I28; J21; J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11150-024-09701-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:reveho:v:23:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s11150-024-09701-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11150/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-024-09701-0

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economics of the Household is currently edited by Shoshana Grossbard

More articles in Review of Economics of the Household from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().