Marital Rights, Education, and Labor Supply: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in France

This paper studies whether expanding women’s decision-making authority within marriage affects female labor supply and girls’ human capital investment. We exploit a major reform of French marital law in 1966, which reallocated control over labor and financial decisions from husbands to wives while leaving divorce institutions unchanged. Using census and family survey data, we implement two complementary empirical strategies. First, exploiting the discontinuity in access to the new marital regime by date of marriage, we show that women married under the new regime are 7 percentage points more likely to be employed more than thirty years later, after childrearing constraints have largely passed. Second, using cohort- and gender-based exposure to the reform, we find that girls who are at key educational decision ages when the reform is announced complete more schooling and are 13 percent more likely to obtain a baccalauréat or a higher-education degree. These education gains translate into higher employment rates and access to higher-skilled occupations in adulthood.