Research

Education Spillover and Its Pathways: Evidence from Bangladesh

Globally, about 254 million school-aged children are not enrolled in school, weakening their future productivity and slowing the economic development of their societies. In this paper, I consider whether investments in educating girls today may be an effective policy approach to support future development by testing if such investments have positive intergenerational spillovers. First, I identify a causal effect by relying on the exogenous variation provided by a conditional cash transfer program that temporarily made secondary education free for girls in rural Bangladesh. I find that a one-year increase in a girl’s education significantly increases her child’s education by 8 percent. Ignoring this spillover leads to underestimating the return on investing in girls’ education. In addition, I test the causal role of various pathways by which a mother’s education may increase her child’s education. Marital matching is the strongest pathway; others are higher bargaining power and lower son preference.

Keywords: education, Bangladesh, birth spacing, bargaining, marital matching
JEL: I25, I21, J12, J13, J16, O12

Published Work:

Journal Papers:

“How Do Female Labor Force Participation Rates Change During Episodes of Globalization and Marginalization?: Global Evidence from 1990 to 2019” (with Bernhard G. Gunter and Bong Sun Seo), The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Global Studies, 17 (1): 1-12, August 2021. Link

“Concessional Financing for Development in Bangladesh” (with Bernhard G. Gunter and M. Faizul Islam), Journal of Bangladesh Studies, 20 (1), October 2018. Link

Policy Report:

“FMLA Eligibility of Underserved Communities” (with Kelly Jones), US Department of Labor Summer Data Equity Challenge on Equity and Underserved Communities, February 2022. Link