market, potentially affecting the characteristics of a woman’s husband and his ideal family size. In addition, it is important to consider that the schooling reform in Ethiopia may also have directly affected the extensive margin decision to marry and the timing of a woman’s first birth.

The first two points are directly investigated in the following subsections using data available from the DHS. However, with only the non-MTI regions of the country and the timing of the reform relative to the data collection, restricting the sample to examine the characteristics of only married women and their husbands removes too many post-reform women from the latest cohorts and significantly weakens the predictive power of the first-stage estimate. Therefore, the discussion regarding impact of schooling on the timing of marriage and births and on the characteristics of husbands will be in the context of the national sample after also taking the MTI reforms into account.<sup>10</sup> Examining the first two potential channels yields evidence that additional schooling leads to women being more literate, less tolerant of domestic abuse, and increasingly likely to work in more productive sectors of the economy. The increase in the opportunity cost of their time generated by this increase in productivity is associated with a decline in the women’s ideal number of children. However, there is no consistent evidence of changes in contraception use, investments in health, or control over household decisions. These findings largely isolate economic motivations such as the increased opportunity cost of time, which is associated with a woman’s decreased demand for children, as the central driver of the reduction in fertility.

# **6.2.1 Knowledge, Beliefs, and Contraception Use**

To form any expectation that the increase in schooling could lead to improved labor market access or understanding of healthcare, it is important to first demonstrate that learning occurred for Ethiopian women during their additional time in school. Estimates in column 1 of table 3 demonstrate that the additional schooling generated by the reform led to a large increase in literacy, and the estimate in column 2 provides evidence that each additional year of schooling led to an increased likelihood of 4.7 percentage points of reading about family planning in a periodical.<sup>11</sup> Although the increase in schooling led to an increased likelihood of reading about family planning, general knowledge of family planning methods is widespread and unaffected by the reform, as shown by column 3. Additionally, the increase in literacy and access to information did not lead to statistically significant changes in health, as measured by body mass index (BMI) and, to take into consideration early-in-life investments, height.

> 10Husbands are, on average, more than seven years older than their wives; therefore, unless the reform reduces the age of the matched husband, even women born in the latest year of the sample, 1988, will have husbands who are on average not greatly affected by the removal of school fees. The median age difference ranges from six to seven years throughout the sample. 11The literacy variable is equal to 1 if the respondent demonstrates that they are able to read a complete sentence and is equal to 0 otherwise. These outcomes are shown for a combined sample of men and women in Chicoine (2019), and the increased effect on literacy is consistent with the findings from a combined sample that includes observations from the 2007 census and the 2016 Living Standards and Measurement Study.

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