The Quiet Revolution and the Family: Gender Composition of Tertiary Education and Early Fertility Patterns
Alena Bičáková and
Stepan Jurajda
No 7965, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
Abstract:
It is well known that highly 'female' fields of study in tertiary education are characterized by higher fertility. However, existing work does not disentangle the selection-causality nexus. We use variation in gender composition of fields of study implied by the recent expansion of tertiary education in 19 European countries and a difference-in-differences research design, to show that the share of women on study peer groups affects early fertility levels only little. Early fertility by endogamous couples, i.e., by tertiary graduates from the same field of study, declines for women and increases for men with the share of women in the group, but non-endogamous fertility almost fully compensates for these effects, consistent with higher early fertility in highly 'female' fields of study being driven by selection of family-oriented students into these fields. We also show that the EU-wide level of gender segregation across fields of study has not changed since 2000.
Keywords: field-of-study gender segregation; tertiary graduates; fertility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 J13 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2014-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Published - revised version published as 'Gender Composition of College Graduates by Field of Study and Early Fertility' in: Review of Economics of the Household, 2017, 15 (4), 1323-1343
Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp7965.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: The Quiet Revolution and the Family: Gender Composition of Tertiary Education and Early Fertility Patterns (2014) 
Working Paper: The Quiet Revolution and the Family: Gender Composition of Tertiary Education and Early Fertility Patterns (2014) 
Working Paper: The Quiet Revolution and the Family: Gender Composition of Tertiary Education and Early Fertility Patterns (2014) 
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:iza:izadps:dp7965
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().