Fertility Expectations and Educational Attainment: Evidence from the Mothers of China's Sibling-less Generation

The speed at which women's educational attainment has caught up with men's is probably one of the greatest social changes in the late 20 century. What explains this impressive increase in female's education? This paper exploits China's One-Child Policy as a natural experiment that exogenously reduced fertility to study the relationship between fertility and educational attainment of the mothers of the sibling-less generation. I use two difference-in-differences approaches to estimate the education changes in the post-policy Han women cohorts. My estimates suggest that the policy increased the education of women younger than 19 when the policy was implemented by up to 1.3 years of schooling, which counts for up to 54.5% of increase in education improvement of women born between 1960-1980. Females under age 15 experienced the strongest effect compared to other teenagers. In addition, the policy increased the likelihood of women completing high school by up to 8.10 percentage points, but has not much effect on college completion. Further analysis on post-school outcomes provides evidence for the potential mechanisms, such as delaying entry to motherhood and increasing labor force participation, through which the policy increased women's education.