‘Gold Miss’ or ‘Earthy Mom’? Evidence From Thailand

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of Thai women's education on their marriage behaviour and fertility. It first uses the data set from the Labor Force Survey to estimate the effect of education on the marriage market. The result from applying the recent doubly robust inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA) indicates that obtaining a university degree decreases women's probability of marriage by 14.8%, emphasising the rise of the ‘Gold Miss’ phenomenon in Thailand. The study further examines the effect of education on fertility. By applying both the instrumental variable using the compulsory education reform as an instrument and pseudo-panel approaches to take into account the endogeneity of schooling, the result shows that education causally reduces fertility, which provides a convincing sequential explanation for the dramatic decline in fertility in Thailand.