Essays on Women's Fertility, Education, and Female Labor Supply in Vietnam

In the first chapter, using data from the Vietnam Population and Housing Censuses from 1989, 1999, and 2009, I apply a differences-in-differences framework to assess the effects of Vietnam’s two-child policy on family size, son preference, and maternal labor supply. I find that first, the policy decreased the probability that a woman has more than two children by 15 percentage points (50%) for women aged less than 30 in 1989 and by 7 percentage points (11.5%) for women aged 30-39 in 1989. The policy reduced the average number of living children by 0.2 births per woman (10%). Second, the policy decreased the proportion of sons in each family by 1.2 percentage points (2.4%). Third, the policy increased women’s labor force participation by 1.3 percentage points (1.5%). In the second chapter, using data from the Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys from 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014, and the Vietnam Population and Housing Census from 2009, I apply a differences-in-differences framework to assess the impacts of Vietnam’s 1991 universal primary education law on educational attainment and fertility. I document that the policy led to an average increase of 0.46 to 0.87 years of education. There is no consistent evidence that the policy decreased the average number of living children. In the third chapter, using the gender composition of the first two children in families with at least two children as instrumental variables for family size, which is an approach that has been used in other contexts (e.g. Angrist and Evans, 1998), I examine the causal relationship between fertility and maternal employment in Vietnam at different points of time in 1989, 1999, and 2009. I found no evidence that parents use sex selective abortion to achieve their son preference. The IV estimates of the effect of fertility on maternal employment in 1989 and 1999 suggest that having an additional child potentially decreased maternal employment by 3.4 and 1.8 percentage points respectively. The estimate for 2009 is -0.02 and statistically significant, suggesting that the presence of an additional child reduced maternal employment by 2 percentage points in 2009.