Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls' school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, evoking a surge of building girls' schools in protestant areas. Using county- and town-level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants decreased the...

This paper examines how marital and fertility patterns have changed along racial and educational lines for men and women. Historically, women with more education have been the least likely to marry and have children, but this marriage gap has eroded as the returns to marriage have changed....

Between 1972 and 1978 U.S. high schools rapidly increased their female athletic participation rates - to approximately the same level as their male athletic participation rates - in order to comply with Title IX, a policy change that provides a unique quasi-experiment in female athletic...

We study the effects of random assignment to coeducational and single-sex classes on the academic performance of female high school students. Our estimation results show that single-sex schooling improves the performance of female students in mathematics. This positive effect increases if the...

This paper examines evidence on the role of assimilation versus source country culture in influencing immigrant women’s behavior in the United States - looking both over time with immigrants' residence in the United States and across immigrant generations. It focuses particularly on labor...

Boys are doing worse in school than are girls, which has been dubbed "the Boy Crisis." An analysis of the latest data on educational outcomes among boys and girls reveals extensive disparities in grades, reading and writing test scores, and other measurable educational outcomes, and these...

We investigate the determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in historical perspective with a focus on the influence of family structure. We capture the latter with two indicators: residential habits (nuclear vs. complex families) and inheritance rules (partition vs. primogeniture)....

Education has been one of the key determinants of economic growth around the world since 1965. In this paper, we discuss three different measures of education, and consider their relationship to the distribution of income as measured by the Gini coefficient as well as to economic growth across...

Reducing the gender gap in education is a primary goal for many countries. Some major challenges for many girls include the distance to school, their safety when commuting to school, lack of agency, and deep-rooted cultural norms. In Zambia, we studied the impact of providing a bicycle to a...

We empirically investigate the determinants of the female decision of investing in post-secondary education, focusing on the role played by the context where young women take their education decision. We first develop a stylized two-period model to analyze the female decision of investing in...