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.
Social Indicators Research, 2019, 143(1): 325–353.
Focusing on different façades of financial well-being such as wealth accumulation and retirement planning, various determinants of financial well-being have been unearthed, and financial literacy has emerged as a crucial factor that increases financial well-being. Hence, financial literacy has been an important policy instrument to increase the financial well-being of individuals, particularly given that it is relatively easy to implement. This paper is an attempt to pave the way for such policies in a group of middle income countries, namely Mexico, Lebanon, Uruguay, Colombia and Turkey. After establishing financial literacy levels, we identify the least financially literate groups in each country to facilitate targeting of public policy. We find that women, younger adults and individuals who cannot read or write in the official language of their country of residence have lower financial literacy scores. In line with the previous findings in the literature on the developed countries, our results indicate that financial literacy increases with education. We also show that it is not only the years of education, but also the quality. In Mexico and Turkey, there are large regional differences that must be addressed. We also find that differences in financial literacy across countries persist even when differences in structural characteristics are taken into account. A partial explanation may be provided by differences in financial inclusion.
Does the salience of religion affect gender gaps in STEM achievement? Because the Islamic calendar is lunar, the time between Ramadan and the TIMSS test date varies across countries and survey cycles. In 19 Muslim-majority countries (TIMSS, grade 8, 1995–2015), boys’ scores do not change significantly among students tested within three months after Ramadan, whereas girls’ scores fall relative to boys’ by 0.15–0.18 standard deviations in mathematics and 0.22–0.27 in sciences, so that girls, who perform as well as boys outside this window, fall behind them within it. Among immigrant students, who are tested on the same dates and largely in the same schools, the widening is less than half as large. The widening is largest in the first three months and absent nine to eleven months after Ramadan. Across countries, it is concentrated where at least 90 percent of the population is Muslim and absent where few people observe Ramadan, and it is also present among fourth graders, who are not obliged to fast. Girls tested after Ramadan are more likely than boys to find mathematics and sciences harder than their classmates do.
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.
This study investigates the dynamics of the child penalty in Italy, exploring its interaction with the gender of the first child and parental leave institutions. Leveraging a rich longitudinal administrative dataset of over 1.5 million private-sector employees from INPS (2005–2024), we apply event-study methods to track labor market trajectories up to ten years post-childbirth. Preliminary findings document a severe and persistent motherhood penalty across both extensive and intensive margins, while revealing that these labor-market costs are driven overwhelmingly by parental gender rather than the child’s gender.
Physical insecurity often acts as a structural barrier to female human capital accumulation. This project investigates how exposure to gender-based violence influences the educational mobility of young women in Türkiye. By linking centralized university placement records (2021–2024) with event-level femicide data from media reports, we analyze whether localized violence creates a “fear constraint” that deters women from pursuing geographically distant programs. Exploiting spatiotemporal variation in local femicide intensity, we compare the university migration decisions of female students to those of their male peers from the same high schools.
Does a perceived threat to ethnic identity dictate urban development? We investigate the long-term effects of the post-WWI annexation and “Italianization” of South Tyrol using a spatial regression discontinuity design across the Austrian-Italian border. Our results document significant jumps in human settlement density near the border, suggesting that the pursuit of autonomy and refuge in the face of cultural erasure profoundly influences geographic choices for new living areas.
This project studies subnational governance and democratic resilience in Istanbul, examining whether the post-2019 municipal expansion of public nurseries, subsidized city restaurants, and merit-based employment offices measurably shifted electoral behavior and reduced political disengagement between the 2019 and 2024 local elections. Employing a ballot-box-level difference-in-differences design combined with KONDA and IPA survey microdata, the study tests three mechanisms — material relief, competence signaling, and disengagement reduction — and evaluates their implications for EU–Turkey social policy convergence, particularly regarding female labor force participation and Chapter 19 implementation.