Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Major/Program

Economics

First Advisor's Name

Dr. Abu Shonchoy

First Advisor's Committee Title

Co-major Professor

Second Advisor's Name

Dr. Mihaela Pintea

Second Advisor's Committee Title

Co-major Professor

Third Advisor's Name

Dr. Cem Karayalcin

Third Advisor's Committee Title

Committee member

Fourth Advisor's Name

Dr. Alejandro Arrieta

Fourth Advisor's Committee Title

Committee member

Keywords

gender economics, women empowerment, labor force participation

Date of Defense

10-20-2022

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays that are connected through the conditional cash transfer program in Bangladesh named Female Secondary School Stipend Program. In the three essays, we evaluated the short-run and long-run impacts of the program on various outcomes related to women. We examined if the program has been able to achieve its long-run goals in terms of labor force participation, marriage market outcomes, and empowerment for women. Two-stage models have been used to estimate the program impacts. To address the plausible endogeneity issues in various settings we used age cohorts, free tuition policy, negative shocks to the household income, and the existence of large industries as instrumental variables. We have found that the program was not successful to increase female labor force participation, but it successfully impacted the marriage market outcomes such as decreased fertility and increased birth control use and reduced the education gap and age gap between husband and wife. However, this dissertation extends the literature by exploring the program’s impact on dowry for rural women of Bangladesh. Additionally, this paper adds value to the literature by being the first paper to inspect the impact of this particular conditional cash transfer program on the empowerment of rural women of Bangladesh by using a standard empowerment index named Women’s empowerment in agriculture index (WEAI).

Identifier

FIDC010876

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