The impact of education on marriage and cohabitation : a causal analysis for Argentina

Abstract

On April 14th 1993 the Ley Federal de Educación No 24.195 was passed on the Argentinean National Congress, and among other things, it involved a significant change in the extension of mandatory education, which went from 7 to 10 years. This paper evaluates the impact of education on marriage and cohabitation by exploiting the flexibility of implementation the law allowed, which implied that some provinces enforced the reforms quickly and massively, while others decided on a more gradual approach. Estimation results suggest a strong negative effect of education on cohabitation. Moreover, significant positive impacts on marriage are found for people in the first quintile of the income distribution and for the sub-sample of individuals that always lived in the same province. Results prove to be robust to the inclusion of political party as a covariate.