Identity and Human Capital Investment: Evidence from Veiling Ban Removal in Turkey

Merve Demirel () and Avenia Ghazarian ()
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Merve Demirel: Stockholm University
Avenia Ghazarian: House of Sustainable Society (HoSS), Postal: Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box 6501, SE-113 83 Stockholm, Sweden

No 2026-1, HoSS Working Paper Series from Stockholm School of Economics, House of Sustainable Society (HoSS)

Abstract: This paper examines how restrictions on religious expression affect women’s educational attainment. We study the 2010 removal of the headscarf ban in Turkish universities, which had long limited access to higher education for visibly religious women. Our empirical strategy combines cohort-level variation in exposure to the reform with individual-level variation in the propensity to veil within a difference-in- differences framework. We estimate veiling propensities using an early wave of the Turkish Demographic and Health Survey and predict them for a later sample using both machine learning and parametric methods. We show that lifting the ban significantly increased educational attainment among women with a higher propensity to veil. These gains appear to be concentrated around the transition into and progression through secondary school. The results remain similar when, instead of individual-level propensities, we use pre-reform veiling prevalence at the province level as an alternative exposure measure.

Keywords: Identity; Religious expression; Veiling ban; Turkey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 J16 J24 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2026-04-28
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