“Gold Miss” or “Earthy Mom”? Evidence from Thailand

This paper investigates the impact of Thai women’s education on their marriage behavior 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 the probability of women’s marriage by 14.8%, emphasizing the rise of the “Gold Miss” phenomenon in Thailand. It 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.