English
Valencià
This paper exploits several compulsory schooling laws in 17 European countries to estimate the causal effect of education on gender-role attitudes. In particular, we study if education affects people’s opinion about if the woman has to leave labor market to take care of the family, and if men have more rights than women to a job when jobs are scarce. We exploit reforms changing the number of years of compulsory education to obtain a source of exogenous variation that can be used as an instrument for education. We find that education reforms provide a good instrument which significantly increases years of schooling for those individuals with a low-educated family. Results indicate that education significantly reduces the probability of agreeing with women traditional gender role between 4-5 percentage points.