Date: Thursday, 21 May 2026, at 2:00 pm
Venue: Room 237, DEM
Speaker: Caroline Perrin (European Commission’s RE-WIRING project – Horizon Europe)
Title: Lex Education: Gender Legislation and Female Educational Attainment.
Abstract: Girls fall behind in school. Laws might fix that : but do they actually? This paper tests whether gender-equitable laws improve female educational attainment, using individual-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) across fifty-plus developing countries, matched to the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law panel. Three results stand out. First, stronger gender laws are robustly associated with higher secondary completion rates, particularly for girls of school age. Second, the effect runs through concrete channels: laws reducing child marriage, expanding women’s labour market access, and protecting against intimate partner violence each independently matter. Third, effects are largest in low-income countries where the legal baseline is lowest and the marginal gain from reform greatest. A difference-in-differences event study around Bangladesh’s 2010 Domestic Violence Act provides corroborating quasi-experimental evidence.
