Research | Elif Erbay

PUBLICATIONS

2024

Women Empowerment through Compulsory Schooling Reform: The Case of Türkiye

E.Kübra Usta, and Elif Erbay

Pursuing Sustainable Development Goals, IU Press, 2024

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This study investigates the causal impacts of the 1997 compulsory schooling reform on women’s empowerment in Türkiye. The reform extended the compulsory education duration from 5 years to 8 years. The policy had an impact on individuals born in 1987 onwards, whereas those born in earlier years were unaffected. This allows us to employ a regression discontinuity design (RDD) and reveal the causal impact of the reform on women’s educational outcomes, their status in the family, and their perceptions and attitudes towards gender roles in relation to the Fifth Sustainable Development Goal. We examined the 2008, 2013, and 2018 waves of the Turkish Demographic and Health Survey (TDHS), which is a nationally representative micro dataset. Results show that this large-scale reform has led to significant improvements in women’s educational outcomes. The policy has led to increases in the years of education, and completion of grade 8 and grade 11 for women, as well as a decrease in educational disparities between spouses. However, when we check other empowerment-related outcomes within the family, results show that the extent of empowerment is quite limited. Only one outcome in each set of variables (perception of gender roles, perception of physical violence, financial independence) shows empowerment. This suggests that higher educational attainment and improved educational status compared to the husband are not reflected in daily lives and the perceptions of women. All in all, stronger educational outcomes for women resulting from the policy have minor empowering effects.

2023

Syrian Refugees and Human Capital Accumulation of Working-age Native Children in Turkey

Selcen Çakır, Elif Erbay, and Murat Kırdar

Journal of Human Capital, 2023

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The arrival of Syrian refugees has significantly changed the labor-market conditions and the relative abundance of different skill groups in Turkey. We examine how the arrival of Syrian refugees affects school enrollment and employment of working-age native children using a difference-in-differences instrumental variable methodology. We find a significant drop in employment, largely due to children shifting from work-school balance to education only. School enrollment rises for boys, especially those with educated parents. However, the rate of girls not engaged in employment or education increases, particularly among those with less-educated parents, but decreases for boys with more-educated parents.
The Effect of Covid-19 on Primary School Enrollments: Evidence from Turkey

Elif Erbay

Post Covid Era: Future of Economies and World Order, IU Press, 2023

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The Covid-19 pandemic caused considerable changes in every division in life, including online learning integrated into the formal education system. Since it had been a new experience for students and teachers, most parents had expressed their concerns over the effectiveness of the learning process. Hence, both the direct impacts of the pandemic and policies adopted in this period have substantially changed educational outcomes. This study empirically analyzes how Covid-19 affected primary school enrollments in Turkey using administrative data. Estimated findings show that primary school enrollments decreased by 1.8% in the 2020/2021 academic year. The primary source of this decline is that 5-year-old children who would have gone to public schools in the absence of the pandemic did not attend school during the pandemic.

WORKING PAPERS

All the Missing Ladies: Political Selection in High-stakes Contests, (with Selcen Çakır & Konstantinos Matakos)

How does political selection respond when the electoral stakes increase? Who gets to represent us? We study the effect that changes in the intensity of electoral competition has on women's political representation in Turkey. We leverage occurrence of two consecutive legislative elections within few months as a natural experiment giving rise to a DiD strategy which allows us to identify JDP's changes in its list composition and rank as a response to heightened competition. We find that the latter led to a wholesale removal and demotion of women candidates from its lists, bucking the previous trend of increasing female representation. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals that most of the women candidates were removed from electable seats and safe (conservative) districts. While this is consistent with theories of statistical discrimination, the removal of women even from inconsequential positions also reveals taste-based discrimination that has a compounding effect. A counterfactual exercise shows that had lists remained unchanged between the two elections, JDP's female representation in parliament would have been up by 50%, thus highlighting the role that intra-party politics play in exacerbating gender-based discrimination own-gender bias in political selection.

Prolonged Guesthood: The Effects of Syrian Refugees on Voting Behavior in Turkey, (with E.Kübra Usta)

This study investigates the effects of Syrian refugee inflow on the voting behavior of natives in Turkey. We utilize administrative data at the provincial level, employ a difference-indifferences strategy for the identification and distance-based instrumental variable to account for the endogenous refugee settlement. We find a positive and significant effect of refugees on the right-wing nationalistic party's (MHP) vote share, while there are no effects on the vote share of the incumbent party (AKP) and the main opposition party (CHP). Investigating the evolution of voting reaction after 2011 shows that AKP vote share first increased in 2015 then dropped in 2018 and 2023. When the heterogeneity of refugee hosting places is considered, CHP vote share increases in highly urban and lower population areas. Overall, our results indicate a considerable voting reaction from natives. We argue that perceived threats of natives based on their sociocultural positions and sociotropic voting behavior explain the natives' reaction.

Intergenerational Educational Mobility and the Role of Gender Norms: Evidence from Turkey

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This paper examines intergenerational educational mobility among females in Turkey, leveraging data from four waves of the Turkish Demographic and Health Surveys (TDHS) from 2003 to 2018 to quantify absolute mobility metrics. Our analysis reveals a significant upward trend in educational mobility for individuals born after 1985, largely attributable to extensive educational reforms aimed at increasing access to schooling. This trend is particularly pronounced in rural areas, suggesting that policy interventions have been effective in reducing regional disparities. In addition to highlighting the impact of educational expansion on mobility dynamics, this study explores the influence of regional, historical, and gender-specific factors. The findings contribute to the broader literature on educational mobility and underscore the importance of continued policy efforts to promote educational equity and socioeconomic advancement in developing countries.