Using data from the China Family Panel Studies, this paper exploits the Compulsory Education Law of China implemented in the 1980s to empirically examine the causal impact of women's education on fertility in rural China by difference-in-differences methods. The results show that an additional year of schooling lowered the number of children a woman would have by approximately 0.09 children, postponed the age of first childbirth by 0.7 years, and reduced the probability of having a second child or more children by 0.18 among those mothers whose first child was a girl. In addition to the income effect, these results are also partly explained by more educated women preferring quality to quantity of children, placing a greater value on leisure and no longer perceiving children as the sole focus in their lives.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.