IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_12251.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Educated to Be Mothers? School Reform and Demographic Backlash

Author

Listed:
  • Gema Lax-Martinez
  • Marco Le Moglie
  • Matteo Sandi

Abstract

Social norms play a critical role in society. This paper studies how difficult it is to manipulate social norms and whether efforts to do so may result in a backlash. We study the 1945 reform of primary education implemented under Franco’s regime in Spain, which promoted nationalist-religious values and emphasized women’s domestic roles. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in exposure between birth cohorts, we show that women exposed to the reform have fewer children and tend to reject the regime’s promoted gender norms. These findings highlight the unintended long-term consequences that state-led efforts to engineer social norms can generate.

Suggested Citation

  • Gema Lax-Martinez & Marco Le Moglie & Matteo Sandi, 2025. "Educated to Be Mothers? School Reform and Demographic Backlash," CESifo Working Paper Series 12251, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12251
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp12251.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • N44 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - Europe: 1913-

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12251. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.