Education policy and early fertility: Lessons from an expansion of upper secondary schooling

Hans Grönqvist and Caroline Hall

No 14/2011, Working Paper Series from Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research

Abstract: This paper studies effects of education policy on early fertility. We study a major educational reform in Sweden in which vocational tracks in upper secondary school were prolonged from two to three years and the curricula were made more academic. Our identification strategy takes advantage of cross-regional and cross-time variation in the implementation of a pilot scheme preceding the reform in which several municipalities evaluated the new policy. The empirical analysis draws on rich population micro data. We find that women who enrolled in the new program were significantly less likely to give birth early in life and that this effect is driven by women with higher opportunity costs of child rearing. There is however no statistically significant effect on mens fertility decisions. Our results suggest that the social benefits of changes in education policy may extend beyond those usually claimed.

Keywords: Schooling reform; teenage childbearing; fertility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2011-12-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:474431/FULLTEXT01 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Education policy and early fertility: Lessons from an expansion of upper secondary schooling (2013)
Working Paper: Education policy and early fertility: lessons from an expansion of upper secondary schooling (2011)
Working Paper: Education policy and early fertility: Lessons from an expansion of upper secondary schooling (2011)
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:hhs:sofiwp:2011_014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research SOFI, Stockholm University, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Daniel Rossetti ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).