Female Admission Caps in Higher Education: The Case of Iran

We study the effect of an Iranian educational policy implemented in 2012 that restricted access to higher education for women in 30% of Iran’s public universities, mostly in the prestigious and popular field of engineering. We analyze the impact of this policy on higher education, the labor market and the marriage market, by exploiting differences in exposure to the policy across gender, cohorts and regions. We find that the resulting unexpected reduction in programs had a negative impact on university education for women, in particular for those in urban areas. We further show that the policy had a mixed impact on the labor market, with positive effects for women without university education and negative effects for women with university education. Finally, we find that the policy also had an impact on the marriage market, as it decreases the probability of young women to marry. Joint work with Julian Emami Namini and Laura Hering.