Human Capital Accumulation and the Expansion of Women’s Economic Rights.” unpublished manuscript

Between 1850 and 1920 most U.S. states passed laws that expanded the rights of married women to own and control their separate property and to own their market earnings. We examine the effects of these legal changes on investment by families in the human capital of girls and young women. Standard approaches to the economics of property rights imply that, as married women gain the right to their earnings and to own and control property, the incentive to invest in women’s and girls ’ human capital will rise. That incentive will be observed through increases in girls ’ schooling rates. We use both published state-level census data and IPUMS data on school attendance to test this prediction, examining the impact of those legal changes on the difference in girls ’ and boys ’ school attendance rates. Our empirical analysis indicates that this expansion of women’s economic rights resulted in higher rates of relative school attendance by girls. Using IPUMS data, we break the sample down by age group and find that the acts had the largest effect on school attendance among young women who were no longer impacted by compulsory schooling laws. Our estimates are robust to changes in the sample of states and to several methods of controlling for possible endogeneity of changes in women’s property laws