Mother’s autonomy and child’s secondary schooling enrollment in Mexico Tanika Chakraborty 1 • Prabal K. De 2 Received: 3 August 2014 / Accepted: 20 October 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Abstract We extend the literature on female autonomy along two dimensions. We first develop a new, direct female autonomy index using survey responses of spouses to a variety of household decision-making questions. We then examine the effects of a mother’s autonomy on her child’s secondary enrollment. We find that our measure is consistent with some of the existing autonomy measures, and that higher autonomy of mothers is correlated with higher secondary enrollment for boys, but not girls. Our results are robust to a range of sensitivity tests. Keywords Female autonomy Á Principal component Á Education Á matching Á Disagreement JEL Classifications D1 Á I28 Á J10 1 Introduction We address the question whether more decision-making power in the hands of a female member in the family has the same welfare effects as equivalent powers in the hands of a male member. In the context of both developed and developing countries, it has been found that the effects of a dollar earned by a female member & Tanika Chakraborty tanika@iitk.ac.in Prabal K. De pde@ccny.cuny.edu 1 Department of HSS-Economics, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, UP 208016, India 2 City College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 160 Convent Avenue, New York, NY 10031, USA 123 Rev Econ Household DOI 10.1007/s11150-015-9314-9