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Causal Impact of Having a College Degree on Women’s Fertility: Evidence From Regression Kink Designs

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Demography

Abstract

An important factor speculated to affect fertility level is education. Theoretical predictions regarding whether education increases or decreases fertility are ambiguous. This study analyzes the causal impact of higher education on fertility using census data administered by Statistics Korea. To account for the endogeneity of education, this study exploits the Korean higher education reform initiated in 1993 that boosted women’s likelihood of graduating from college. Based on regression kink designs, we find that having a college degree reduces the likelihood of childbirths by 23 percentage points and the total number of childbirths by 1.3. Analyses of possible mechanisms show that labor market–related factors are a significant channel driving the negative effects; female college graduates are more likely to be wage earners and more likely to have high-wage occupations.

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Notes

  1. Regarding substitution and income effects, Becker and Lewis (1973) argue that income effects might be relatively weak because of a quality-quantity tradeoff when income increases.

  2. We do not discuss the studies that examine the effect of education on teenage fertility because teenage fertility is not a focus of this study.

  3. Information regarding the higher education reform implemented in the 1990s is retrieved from Kim and Lee (2006) and Oh (2011).

  4. To the best of our knowledge, no official statistics exist on college completion rates in Korea.

  5. For testing the balance in the share of women, we added male observations to the analysis sample.

  6. The educational reform that we exploit to isolate the causal impact of education on fertility happened in 1993. The analysis periods are from 1988 and 1997, with 1988 to 1992 being the pre-treatment periods and 1993 to 1997 being the post-treatment periods. The women in our sample experienced their childbirths during or after these periods. Thus, our analysis periods do not overlap with the periods in which the total fertility rate dropped very rapidly (i.e., 1970 to 1985). Because the total fertility rate was very stable near 1.5 and 1.6, respectively, for our two analysis periods, we believe that our analysis periods suffer less from confounding factors.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the Editors and two referees for invaluable suggestions. We are also indebted to Sangho Kim, Yoonseob Oh, Hisam Kim, Wan-Sub Lim, and other seminar participants at the Korean Institute of Health and Social Affairs. This research was supported by the Korean Institute of Health and Social Affairs, and an earlier version of this paper circulated as the Institute’s working paper (Research Paper 2017-01) under the title, “Analyzing the Causal Impact of Higher Education on Fertility and Potential Mechanisms: Evidence from Regression Kink Designs.”

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Correspondence to Hosung Sohn.

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Sohn, H., Lee, SW. Causal Impact of Having a College Degree on Women’s Fertility: Evidence From Regression Kink Designs. Demography 56, 969–990 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-019-00771-9

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