Transitory increases in religious salience at critical life-cycle junctures can generate permanent, gender-differentiated human capital deficits that persist into adulthood. This paper provides causal evidence for this claim by exploiting within-enrollment-year variation in Ramadan fasting duration across Turkish provinces, driven by latitude and the lunar calendar, as a quasi-random shock to local religious intensity at the moment of school entry. A 30-minute increase in daily fasting duration reduces girls' probability of completing primary school by 0.6 to 0.8 percentage points, roughly twice the effect for boys, operating entirely through delayed or foregone enrollment rather than through dropout or in-school progression. These demand-side impacts are driven by paternal rather than maternal religious history, which both amplifies the entry-year shock and exerts a direct negative effect, revealing a gendered asymmetry in intra-household decision-making over children's human capital investments. The consequences persist into adulthood as lower female labor force participation and shifts toward higher fertility at the intensive margin, documenting a pathway through which temporary community-level cultural shocks generate persistent gender inequality.
This paper studies one micro-level mechanism that may contribute to persistent gender inequality in Muslim-majority countries: the effect of religiosity on girls’ and boys’ STEM achievement. I use eighth-grade Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) data and exploit quasi-random variation in the proximity of exam dates to the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. I find that girls’ math and science scores decline significantly in the three months following Ramadan, while boys’ scores are unaffected. Survey evidence suggests that the pattern operates through heightened religiosity and a strengthening of traditional gender norms within households. Consistent with this mechanism, I document post-Ramadan increases in indicators of gender stereotyping for girls, including lower academic self-confidence, greater negative peer pressure, memory depletion, and stricter parental treatment.
Presented at: 33rd European Association of Labor Economists; 3rd ASREC Graduate Student Workshops; 34th Annual Conference of European Society for Population Economics; 3rd Ph.D. Workshop in Economics at Collegio Carlo Alberto; #ASREC24hr; University of Utah; Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
This paper examines the Village Institutes (1940–1954), an ambitious rural education reform in Turkey that trained local youth as teachers and deployed them back to their home communities. Using newly digitized sub-provincial panel data on education, 1985 census microdata, and a staggered difference-in-differences framework, I evaluate the causal impact of the reform on rural human capital accumulation by comparing rural and urban trajectories. Driven by an extensive margin expansion of infrastructure and endogenous capital accumulation through community in-kind labor contributions, village school enrollment experienced a sharp surge following a four-year gestation lag. While the reform substantially raised aggregate primary enrollment, gender heterogeneity analyses reveal that households predominantly allocated newly created slots to boys, resulting in a widening absolute gender gap. Exploiting regional variation in the operational longevity of the institutes across provinces, I document how the reform reshaped the spatial distribution of education across Turkey's persistent west-east divide and influenced the urban-rural gap. Despite the program's abolition in 1954, mandatory twenty-year service obligations anchored deployed educators in rural areas, enabling the realized educational gains to persist for a generation.