The recent literature exploiting natural events as "natural experiment" instruments is reviewed to assess to what extent it has advanced empirical knowledge. A weakness of the studies that adopt this approach is that the necessary set of behavioral, market, and technological assumptions made by the authors in justifying their interpretations of the estimates is often absent. The methodology and findings from twenty studies are summarized and simple economic models are used to elucidate the implicit assumptions made by the authors and to demonstrate the sensitivity of the interpretations of the findings to the relaxation of some of these assumptions.

Natural "Natural Experiments" in Economics

The positive cross-sectional relationship between the schooling of mothers and their children is substantially biased upward due to correlations between schooling and heritable ability as well as assortative mating. An increase in the schooling of women would not have beneficial effects in terms of the schooling of children. Increased maternal schooling leads to reduced home time for mothers. Anticipating the consequences of investing in women's schooling requires attention to the role that schooling plays in the marriage market as well as to opportunities in the labor market for women.

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Does Increasing Women's Schooling Raise the Schooling of the Next Generation?

We provide a measure of equality of educational opportunity in 54 countries, estimated as the effect of family background on student performance in two international TIMSS tests. We then show how organizational features of the education system affect equality of educational opportunity. Our model predicts that late tracking and a long pre-school cycle are beneficial for equality, while pre-school enrollment is detrimental at low levels of enrollment and beneficial at higher levels. Using cross-country variations in education policies and their interaction with family background at the student level, we provide empirical evidence supportive of these predictions.

/pdf/education-policy-and-equality-of-opportunity-irxm2qb6uf.pdf

Education policy and equality of opportunity

Why Governments Should Invest More To Educate Girls. Center Discussion Paper.

The analysis uses new data matching parents and their young adult children to study the impact of family background on young people's educational attainments. The data is derived from the first seven years (1991-97) of the British Household Panel Study. Parents' educational attainments are found to be very strongly associated with their children's educational attainments, and for an important part of the population these associations can be given a causal interpretation. In addition, young adults who experience single parenthood as children and those who come from families in the bottom income quartile have significantly lower educational attainments.

Family Matters: Impacts of Family Background on Educational Attainments

The hypothesis that increases in the schooling of women enhance the human capital of the next generation and thus make a unique contribution to economic growth is assessed on the basis of data describing green revolution India. Estimates are obtained that indicate that a component of the significant and positive relationship between maternal literacy and child schooling in the Indian setting reflects the productivity effect of home teaching and that the existence of this effect, combined with the increase in returns to schooling for men, importantly underlies the expansion of female literary following the onset of the green revolution.

/pdf/women-s-schooling-home-teaching-and-economic-growth-2t8pglguot.pdf

Women's Schooling, Home Teaching, and Economic Growth

The hypothesis that increases in the schooling of women enhance the human capital of the next generation and thus make a unique contribution to economic growth is assessed on the basis of data describing green revolution India. Estimates are obtained that indicate that a component of the significant and positive relationship between maternal literacy and child schooling in the Indian setting reflects the productivity effect of home teaching and that the existence of this effect, combined with the increase in returns to schooling for men, importantly underlies the expansion of female literacy following the onset of the green revolution.

Prem Vashishtha

Papers

Women's Schooling, Home Teaching, and Economic Growth

Women's Schooling, Home Teaching, and Economic Growth