2024-03-28T22:29:47
119925
Thu Mar 28 22:29:48 EDT 2024
Data and Code for: Women's Suffrage and Children's Education
Esra Kose
Elira Kuka
Na'ama Shenhav
119925
https://doi.org/10.3886/E119925V1
While a growing literature shows that women, relative to men, prefer greater investment in children, it is unclear whether empowering women produces better economic outcomes. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in U.S. suffrage laws, we show that exposure to suffrage during childhood led to large increases in educational attainment for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, especially blacks and Southern whites. We also find that suffrage led to higher earnings alongside education gains, although not for Southern blacks. Using newly-digitized data, we show that education increases are primarily explained by suffrage-induced growth in education spending, although early-life health improvements may have also contributed.
I21 Analysis of Education
N32 Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy: U.S.; Canada: 1913-