The Impact of Education on Fertility: Identification Based on Compulsory Education Laws
2011/05/24
研討會日期 : 2011-05-24
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Myoung-Jae Lee
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Myoung-Jae Lee got his Ph.D. in Economics from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1989. He is currently serving as Professor of Department of Economics at Korea University. His research field is in econometrics and statistics, and labor and health economics.
演講摘要 : A negative relation between women's schooling and fertility have been observed by social scientists, leading some of them to propose education as a policy tool for family planning. However, for a female both fertility and schooling are choice variables, which may be determined by some common factors, such that schooling is endogenous and the observed negative relationship may not represent causality. This study use a newly proposed regression discontinuity estimator and takes advantage of a compulsory education law change to identify the causal relationship between fertility and education. The data used in this research come from the 1990 Census of Taiwan, where there was an extension of compulsory education from six to nine years. We find that married women's schooling does not have any impact on their number of children and age at first-birth. The absence of impact of schooling on fertility outcomes in the case of Taiwan may be due to the success of its family planning program, which was launched in 1964 and has set off a downward trend in Taiwan's fertility rate.
