More Schooling, More Children? Compulsory Schooling and Fertility in Europe

Margherita Fort, Nicole Schneeweis and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer

No 5068, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We study the relationship between education and fertility, exploiting compulsory schooling reforms in England and Continental Europe, implemented between 1936 and 1975. We assess the causal effect of education on the number of biological children and the incidence of childlessness. We find surprising results for Continental Europe: the additional education generated by compulsory schooling expansions led to an increase in the number of biological children per woman and a decrease in childlessness. The results for England point in the opposite direction. Moreover, for the Continent we find that education during this time led to fewer women who remained unmarried over their life course. Our findings are robust to a number of sensitivity and falsification checks.

Keywords: education; fertility; causal effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp5068.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:ces:ceswps:_5068

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().