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Title: Schooling Expansion and the Female Marriage Age: Evidence from Indonesia

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2019

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Abstract: This paper analyzes how education distribution affects the marriage market (in particular, female marriage age) by exploiting a massive primary school construction program in Indonesia in the late 1970s as a quasi-natural experiment. Using the varia- tion across regions in the number of schools constructed and the variation across birth cohorts, I show that in densely populated areas, primary school construction did not affect primary school attainment rate. Moreover, the program decreased secondary school attainment rate for both men and women due to a crowding out of teacher resources. Using this change in the education distribution as a source of variation and taking advantage of the large average spousal age gap (five years), I show a woman marries earlier when average education of other women decreases holding their po- tential husbands education distribution unchanged. I then develop a novel two-to-one dimensional matching model with transferable utilities in an OLG framework and show that the empirical finding suggests that in Indonesia, male education is complementary to both characteristics of women: education and youth.

Url: http://www.columbia.edu/~dz2266/JMP_DanyanZha.pdf

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Zha, Danyan

Publisher: Columbia University

Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Education, Family and Marriage, Gender

Countries: Indonesia