"Entry into Marriage, Motherhood and the Arab Spring : Evidence from Egypt"
(with Rozenn Hotte and Philip Verwimp)

The abstract :
The Egyptian Revolution has been shown to have triggered important economic and social changes, including the reduction of gender inequalities. However, few has been said on the impact of the Arab Spring on the age of entry into marriage and motherhood, which are key issues for women’s welfare. To shed light on this question, we combine an original dataset of the Egyptian Revolution, with the 2018 wave of the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey. We rely on quasi-experimental geographical and historical variations in the level of violence, to build a difference-in-differences analysis. Our main findings are that women residing in rural areas who were aged between 16 and 20 at the time of the Egyptian Revolution, marry earlier than the previous cohorts, and have children earlier as well. These results tend to moderate previous evidence on the increase in women’s empowerment following the Arab Spring.