Women's Suffrage and Children's Education

NBER Working Paper No. 24933

Issued in August 2018, Revised in June 2020

NBER Program(s):Children, Development of the American Economy, Economics of Education, Labor Studies, Public Economics



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.

Acknowledgments

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w24933