Paolo Pinotti discussion of: Religious symbols in schools
讨论Maurin和Navarrete关于1994年法国学校禁止宗教符号指令对穆斯林女性教育、婚姻和生育影响的研究，发现教育程度和与本地人结婚概率提高，而2004年禁令效果较小。
The paper by Eric Maurin and Nicolas Navarrete examines the effects of a directive by the French Ministry of Education in 1994 that required schools to ban ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols. Data from the Labour Force Survey 2009–19 show that educational attainment increased for Muslim women attending middle schools after the ban compared with non-Muslim women in the same cohorts, while the same differential trend is not present among men. The probability of marrying with natives and the number of children also increased for Muslim women in the treated cohorts relative to the other groups. The main merit of this paper is to address an extremely relevant (and politically contentious!) issue – namely, whether veiling improves or hampers the integration opportunities of Muslim female students in European countries – leveraging a very clean policy experiment. The evidence about the effects of the 1994 directive is very neat and very convincing. These same results are compared with the effects of another policy, enacted in 2004, which definitively prohibited veiling in French schools. The latter policy generated much smaller effects. The authors convincingly argue that these smaller effects are due to the fact that, 10 years after the 1994 directive, the norm of not wearing the veil was already widely spread in French schools. Interestingly, the previous paper by Abdelgadir and Fouka (2020) finds opposite (i.e., negative) effects of the 2004 policy on the educational attainment of Muslim women. Although Maurin and Navarrete discuss some possible explanations, the exact reasons for the discrepancy between the results reported in the two papers remain a bit unclear so additional research in this direction may be worthwhile.