Who Benefited from Women's Suffrage?

Esra Kose, Elira Kuka and Na'ama Shenhav

No 1809, Departmental Working Papers from Southern Methodist University, Department of Economics

Abstract: While a growing literature has shown that women prefer investments in child welfare and increased redistribution, little is known about the long-term effect of empowering women. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in U.S. suffrage laws, we show that children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds who were exposed to women�s political empowerment during childhood experienced large increases in educational attainment, especially blacks and Southern whites. We also find improvements in earnings among whites and blacks that experienced educational gains. We employ newly digitized data to map these long-term effects to contemporaneous increases in local education spending and childhood health, showing that educational gains were linked to improvements in the policy environment.

Keywords: women's suffrage; educational attainment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ftp1.economics.smu.edu/WorkingPapers/2018/ ... aShenhav-2018-07.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:smu:ecowpa:1809

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from Southern Methodist University, Department of Economics Department of Economics, P.O. Box 750496, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275-0496.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ömer Özak (ozak@smu.edu).