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How Do Pakistani Parents’ Preferences Drive Investments in Their Girls?
By Rossella Calvi, Hira Farooqi and Eeshani Kandpal
The traditional economics model for human capital accumulation says that labor market returns to schooling drive parents’ investments in their children’s education. Makes sense—we choose to invest in our children’s schooling based on how much we think they will earn from a future job that requires that level of schooling.
But in many low- and middle-income countries, women often don’t participate in the formal labor force. In these settings, the labor market returns to schooling are unlikely to be salient for parents making schooling choices for their children. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in these same settings, girls face many barriers to schooling. One such setting is Pakistan, where only 68 percent of all girls are in primary school and a mere 37 percent in secondary school. Half of enrolled girls complete secondary school. Only 26 percent of all women are in the labor force and 93 percent of women are married by age 29.
In a new paper, we ask how Pakistani parents’ preferences regarding their daughters’ marital and post-marital outcomes and beliefs around the marital returns to schooling drive their investments in girls’ education. To do so, we conduct a hypothetical choice experiment in Lahore and Karachi to estimate parental preferences over a wide range of marital outcomes for their daughters. Our choice experiment allows us to quantify the value that parents place on the adherence to traditional marital customs (such as dowry, arranged marriage, and kinship marriage), the groom’s characteristics (age, education level, income, and temperament), and their daughter’s agency and autonomy after marriage in various domains.
But that’s not all. We go further to distinguish between parents’ beliefs around the returns to girls’ education and their preferences for their daughters’ marriage outcomes. To do so, we design a survey instrument to elicit parents’ subjective expectations about their daughters' marriage and education outcomes, as well as their perceptions around marital and post-marital returns to girls’ education. We also measure parents’ willingness-to-pay (in terms of dowry) for adherence traditional marital customs and daughters' marital and post-marital outcomes, and put all this together using a structural model of schooling decisions that incorporates these preferences, perceived costs, and beliefs about marital returns to education.
We uncover some striking patterns. First and foremost, we find evidence of significantly different preferences between mothers and fathers, even within the same family. For instance, fathers prioritize the adherence to traditional marriage customs and are willing to pay more in dowry for a marriage with these characteristics, while mothers emphasize their daughters’ post-marital agency. Generally, all parents believe that education can alter–and often improve–their daughters' marital outcomes. For instance, parents believe that completing secondary education can lead to a groom with a 30 percent higher income. Notably, parents also foresee paying higher dowries for better-educated daughters, which may reflect a belief that educated brides attract higher-quality grooms.
When it comes to promoting girls’ education, our counterfactual simulations identify two crucial but often overlooked channels: the differing preferences of mothers and fathers and the role of subjective beliefs about how education affects marriage prospects. Mothers may prioritize marriage outcomes and schooling differently than fathers do. Recognizing and addressing these differences is key to crafting effective policies. One other promising approach is using information campaigns to highlight the marital and post-marital benefits of education. By showing parents how schooling can positively impact their daughters’ futures, these campaigns can complement efforts to tackle broader barriers to education. While it’s ideal for education to be valued beyond its marriage-market returns, in contexts where many girls still miss out on school entirely, this pragmatic step could make a meaningful difference. Empowering families with better information could ultimately serve as a catalyst for breaking entrenched norms and opening doors for future generations.