Abstract EN:

In the past decade, millions of children around the world have gained access to educational opportunities. However, three years after the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals of universal primary and secondary education by 2030, there has been no progress in reducing the global number of out-of-school children. To address this issue, this thesis explores how families strategically invest in their offsprings’ education, by gender. Chapter 1 introduces the broad determinants of children’s human capital with a focus on family backgrounds such as mothers’ endowments. The study explores the relationship between women’s economic rights and children’s education in developing countries. Implicit in many researches on education is the existence of interactions between family members. Accordingly, the second chapter revisits the link between income shocks and educational achievement by considering the role of sibling composition in a rural region of Tanzania. Children suffer an additional penalty during income shocks the larger the share of girls among (younger) siblings. Finally, families might decide to underinvest in children’s education, mostly in their daughters, if they expect that they will not be able to obtain the returns for this education. Thus, the last chapter assesses theoretically and empirically the intergenerational parent-child exchange in Indonesia. We find that a substantial fraction of human capital gains for both girls and boys, generated by exposure to an educational reform, is shared with the parental generation. We show that education positively affects old-age transfers through additional labor and marital market returns for both men and women.