Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The speed at which women's educational attainment has caught up with men's is probably one of the greatest social change 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 first DD model estimates the differences in the educational attainment between the ethnic majority (Han) women and the ethnic majority (Han) men, both for the post-policy group and the pre-policy group. My second DD model estimates the differences in the educational attainment between Han women and the ethnic minority (non-Han) women, both for the post-policy group and the pre-policy group, utilizing the different policy intensities between Han and non-Han. My estimates suggest that the policy increased the education of women younger than 19 when the policy was implemented by up to 1.304 years of schooling, which counts for up to 54.5% of increase in education improvement of women born between 1960-1980. Female who below 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. The paper contributes to literature on explaining the enlarging gap of educational attainment between women and men. It also sheds light on the literature on linkages between fertility and human capital accumulation in general.