Abstract
This paper estimates the effects of China’s 1986 Compulsory Education Law (CEL) on gender gaps in intrahousehold empowerment. The analysis uses a province-level dataset compiled from the population census and woman social status with a cohort difference-in-differences empirical strategy. This paper finds that the exposure to CEL had a positive impact on egalitarian intrahousehold decision making. It also increased the likelihood with which respondents reported perceiving egalitarian empowerment within the household. Additional evidence on mechanisms suggests that the results are due to exposure to CEL fostering earnings of female respondents and egalitarian gender attitudes of all respondents, as well as altering the family characteristics in terms of marriage age and husband’s schooling of female respondents.
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Notes
The exact question about one’s marital status in the 2010 NSWSS is “ What is your marital status?” A respondent may choose an answer from one of three options: “unmarried”, “married”, and “divorced or widowed”. This study categorizes “married” and “divorced or widowed” into “ever married” and uses these ever-married respondents as the sample of analysis. No questions were found in the survey about one’s relationship status, such as cohabitation.
The number of migrants is small and negligible in the 2010 NSWSS.
This paper uses the subsample of respondents born between 1968 and 1974 in the first provinces where the CEL-affected birth year is 1971/1972 for two considerations: first, given that the allocation of the treatment status should be as equal as possible, in this subsample the birth years of control group are from 1968 to 1972, the birth years of treatment group are from 1971 to 1974; second, the number of observations should be as large as possible, so this paper chooses the first provinces where the CEL-affected birth year was not only 1971 but also 1972.
This paper uses the 1% sample of 1982 census data to calculate the proportion of population aged 18-30 who had received less than nine years of schooling in each province.
Ebenstein (2010) provides the information on the provincial-level average monetary penalty rate.
The Chinese government stipulates that the minimum age for employment is 16 years old.
Data source is the 1% sample of 2010 Chinese Census.
Duflo (2012) provides a related literature review.
Female respondents’ yearly income includes earnings from labor (e.g., wage), rental income (e.g., housing, vehicle or land) and yields from properties such as stocks, bonds, and funds. Given that we aim to examine the channels of female respondents’ economic conditions due to the exposure to CEL, this paper focuses on the income that earned by female respondents themselves and does not include social transfer payments. The variable of female labor force participation is coded as 1 if a female respondent works in the nonagricultural sector and 0 otherwise.
In the 2010 NSWSS, the question about husband’s asset ownership is: “Dose your husband have the following properties? (1) house; (2) land; (3) savings; (4) car; and (5) equity/fund”. A female respondent should answer “yes” or “no” for each property. This paper recodes the answer “yes” as 1 and “no” as 0, and constructs the index of husband’s asset ownership as follows: first, this paper standardizes the five dummy variables using means and standard deviations; second, this paper takes the average of the z-scores of five dummy variables; third, this paper standardizes the final index. So, the index of husband’s asset ownership is essentially z-scores.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Editor Bilge Erten and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
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As an independent author of this manuscript, I contributed the idea, did the experiments, prepared the tables and figures, wrote and revised the manuscript.
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Ma, S. Compulsory education and gender gaps in intrahousehold empowerment. Rev Econ Household (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-024-09701-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-024-09701-0