Education Is Not Uniformly Associated with the Timing of First Birth and Union: Evidence from Quantile Regression Analysis of 50 Countries

Ewa Batyra , Center for Demographic Studies (CED) and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)

The relationship between educational level and the age at which women start families has been researched extensively. However, studies mainly explored how additional schooling shifts the mean or, more broadly, only one point of the age at first birth and union distributions. This ignores distributional variation in the association between education and the timing of family formation, and the fact that schooling might shape behaviors of the most vulnerable and the more privileged women differently. Using quantile regressions, I study heterogeneity in the relationship between education and the age at first birth and the age at first union across the distributions of these events within 50 low-and middle-income countries. I examine whether additional schooling shifts relatively early childbearing and union formation (i.e., the lower parts of the distributions) similarly or differently than it shifts the other parts of the distributions. The association between an additional year at school and the age at first birth and the age at first union is weaker in the lower than the upper parts of the distributions. Education has a relatively weak effect on the reduction of early first births and unions and plays an unequalizing role in shaping family formation trajectories within countries. These findings are key to understanding the persistently high levels of early pregnancies and marriages in low-and middle-income countries, despite educational expansion.

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 Presented in Session 38. Fertility and Education