Motherhood and Women’s Self-Employment: Theory and Evidence from Nigeria
利用尼日利亚全国代表性数据，研究发现当自雇以非正规形式为主且婚姻带来大家庭网络时，母职对女性自雇概率无显著影响，而教育不足才是主要驱动因素。
The literature holds that having young children pushes women into self-employment to reconcile motherhood demands with their professional ambitions. However, knowledge gaps remain on how this effect differs by social context. Using nationally representative data from Nigeria, this paper demonstrates that motherhood has no statistically significant impact on women’s self-employment probabilities in a context where self-employment is predominantly informal and marriage creates extended family networks. Instead, after accounting for selection bias and the endogeneity of fertility and education decisions jointly, we find that lack of education drives up women’s self-employment probabilities in such a context. These findings are robust to alternative specifications.