Education, childbearing, and female labor market participation : Evidence from Lebanon

Abstract EN

The objective of this paper is the investigation of the determinants of labor market participation for a sample of young Lebanese women.

It was observed that female labor market participation in Lebanon is extremely low.

While the paper reproduces the standard result that education is an important determinant of female labor market participation, it finds that, once one uses an instrumental variables estimator to control for the endogeneity of fertility, the correlation between labor market and childbearing completely disappears.

After showing that education alone cannot explain the low labor market participation of Lebanese women, the paper tests the role of cultural factors and examines whether religion plays a role in determining labor market participation.

Contrary to what is often believed, no stgnificant relationship was found between religion and female participation.