Women’s Suffrage and Children’s Education

Abstract

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 US 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. (JEL H75, I21, I22, J13, J15, J16, N32)

Social externalities of women empowerment: Evidence from suffrage movements of late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States

“…Moreover, other studies to examine short-run and long-run effects of suffrage movements examine many other potential confounders. Their results, in-line with the results of Appendix B, lend to the exogenity of these laws(Carruthers & Wanamaker, 2015;Kose et al, 2021;Miller, 2008).…”

“…However, suffrage also has a positive effect among whites as the main effect of exposure share is negative and statistically significant (column 3, row 1). Kose et al (2021) suggest an increase of about 0.9 years of schooling among Black people as a result of a full exposure to suffrage laws (off a mean of 5.2 years). Using their estimation combined with column 3 of 4 She finds a reduction in incarceration of about 2 percentage-points, off a mean of 0.025.…”

“…We restrict the sample to individuals between 10 and 60 years old. 1 We merge this data based on state-of-birth with the database of suffrage law reforms taken from Kose et al (2021). We remove four states that adopted the law in the nineteenth century, that is, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado.…”

“…We also use data on the dry status of counties extracted from Sechrist (2012) to calculate the share of dry counties. We use data from Kose et al (2021) to build a dummy to indicate whether Poll tax is effective in a state or not. We implement regressions that include state fixed effects, year fixed effects, and region-byyear fixed effects.…”

“…Several streams of research in various settings document that empowering women through conventional legal system channels such as suffrage reforms or community behavior channels leads to higher investment in children and improvement in their outcomes (Bozzano, 2017; Duflo, 2012; Homan, 2017; Kose et al, 2021; Nobles et al, 2010). For instance, Kose et al (2021) exploit the space–time variations in suffrage laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States and show that children exposed to suffrage reveal improvements in education and future labor market outcomes. They argue that a large portion of observed improvements can be explained by suffrage‐induced growth in public school spending.…”