Women’s Employment and Children’s Education: Longitudinal Evidence From Nepal

Sarah R. Brauner-Otto , McGill University
Sarah Baird
Dirgha J. Ghimire, University of Michigan

Increases in female labor force participation and girls’ education are two dramatic changes in the family in the past century and continue to be global phenomena. This study examines this relationship in rural Nepal, the type of setting where we know relatively little about this relationship. Using the CVFS we combine over 60 years of yearly data on maternal employment and their children’s education with similarly detailed information on the employment of other household members and a range of individual, household, and neighborhood level characteristics that may influence both mother’s selection into employment and children’s education. We estimate hazard models of dropping out of school, with and without instrumenting mother’s employment, along with child-level fixed effects models of being in school. Once we account for selection, mother’s employment is positively associated with girls’ education for low status families but is negatively associated with children’s education for high status families.

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 Presented in Session 211. Female Schooling, Employment, and Demography