Melike Kökkızıl

I am an economist studying how cultural norms, religious norms in particular, shape gender inequality in education, work, and the family. My research sits at the intersection of the political economy of development, gender economics, and the economics of education. I am currently a Visiting Fellow at the Max Weber Programme of the European University Institute (EUI).

My job market paper asks why gender gaps in education persist even where primary schooling is compulsory and accessible. Exploiting cross-province variation in Ramadan fasting duration in Turkey as a quasi-random shock to local religious salience at school entry, I show that a transitory rise in religious intensity reduces primary school completion, roughly twice as much for girls as for boys, entirely through deliberate non-enrollment rather than dropout or a lack of schools. The decision is driven by fathers: heightened religious salience leads those with deeper religious histories to perceive secular schooling as a threat, making non-enrollment an act of cultural preservation, while mothers play no comparable role. The deficits follow girls into adulthood, appearing decades later as lower labor force participation and larger families.

My ongoing projects examine religiosity and gender gaps in STEM performance, the child penalty and family policies in Italy, how exposure to femicides constrains women's educational choices in Türkiye, whether municipal social policy strengthens democratic resilience in Istanbul, and the long-term effects of ethnic-identity threat on urban development in South Tyrol.

I received my Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Milan-Bicocca in 2021. Before my current fellowship, I was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the EUI (2023–2025), where I also taught a Ph.D. course on the economics of religion, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Prior to my Ph.D., I worked as a short-term consultant at the World Bank and an external collaborator at the International Labour Organization; one of my pre-doctoral studies appeared in Social Indicators Research.

You can reach me at melike.kokkizil@eui.eu or melikekokkizil@gmail.com.