Compulsory Schooling and Early Labor Market Outcomes in a Middle-Income Country

The Value of Mandating Maternal Education in a Developing Country

“…Because the Turkish law allows pupils who are 72 months old by the end of the calendar year to begin elementary schooling in the corresponding academic year (Dinçer, Kaushal, and Grossman 2014), children who were born in 1987 constitute the first fully affected birth cohort. 4 Note that as parents (and school administrators) can exert a considerable degree of discretion with respect to school starting age, some children can start elementary school a year earlier than their own birth cohort and vice versa (Torun 2015). Therefore, while the majority of children born in 1986 were likely to start elementary school in 1992 and not bound by the reform, some of them possibly delayed it to 1993 and were impacted by the reform.…”

“…Consequently, as shown in Appendix Figure 1, trends in the percent of women holding at least a middle school degree exhibited a secular jump among women who were bound by the reform. 6 Predictably, using the "eight-year uninterrupted education reform" as the source of identifying variation, a number of studies have examined the causal impact of extended primary schooling on different outcomes, including earnings, subjective well-being, religiosity, marital status, fertility, health outcomes, gender gap in educational attainment, and domestic violence (Cesur, Dursun, and Mocan 2014;Mocan 2014;Dinçer, Kaushal, and Grossman 2014;Güneş 2015Güneş , 2016Torun 2015;Dursun and Cesur 2016;Erten and Keskin forthcoming).…”

“…On the contrary, schools became more concentrated after the reform and students were transported from rural areas to the nearest schools using the bussing system, and the capacity of boarding schools in central areas 6 As the focus of the current study is examining the impact of maternal education on child health, we display the trends in educational attainment of women who gave birth to at least one child. However, using different data sets, a number of studies show that the 1997 compulsory schooling reform caused a significant increase in the lower secondary schooling of both men and women in all parts of the country regardless of urban versus rural residential status or of birth of children (Cesur and Mocan 2013;Mocan 2014;Torun 2015;Dursun and Cesur 2016). 7 Note that the decision to attend middle school upon completing a five-year elementary school degree is made when the child is 11 years old.…”

“…As supported by the available evidence, we argue that even for those living in rural areas, the schooling mandate played a much bigger role in increasing educational attainment. To begin with, the reform had a greater impact on female education compared to that of males (Mocan 2014;Torun 2015;Dursun and Cesur 2016). It is well known that there has been a considerably high degree of stigma attached to girls attending secondary schools in Turkey (TDHS 1998;Aytaç and Rankin 2004;Rankin and Aytaç 2006;Unicef 2007).…”

“…In addition, we argue in Section II that the primary driver of the jump in educational attainment was not the increased school availability, but the mandate of the reform. Therefore, as preferred by a number of other researchers, including Erten and Keskin (forthcoming), Cesur and Mocan (2013), Mocan (2014), Torun (2015), and Dursun and Cesur (2016), we consider that an instrumental variables estimation method enabled by a fuzzy-RDD framework at hand is the most appropriate empirical strategy to study the implications of extended schooling due to the 1997 education reform. Lastly, our estimates are robust to accounting for potential regional and province level differences in the implementation of the reform (in addition to addressing potential convergence in child health at the province level) by controlling for province specific birth cohort trends.…”