The effect of fertility on female labor supply in a labor market with extensive informality

Generalizing the Causal Effect of Fertility on Female Labor Supply

We study the effect of fertility on labor supply in Argentina and Mexico exploiting a source of exogenous variability in family size first introduced by Angrist and Evans (1998) for the United States. Our results constitute the first external validation of the estimates obtained for the US. External validation of empirical results is central to the making of rigorous science, but there are very...

The Effect of a First Child on Female Labor Supply: Evidence from Women Seeking Fertility Services

Estimating the causal effect of a first child on female labor supply is complicated by the endogeneity of the fertility decision. That is, factors that trigger the decision to have a first child could also affect baseline labor supply; empirical approaches that do not account for this difficulty will yield biased estimates. This paper addresses this problem by focusing on a sample of women from...

Two Birds with One Stone: Female Labor Supply, Fertility, and Market Childcare

The correlation between female labor force participation rate (FPR) and total fertility rate (TFR) across developed countries has switched from negative to positive. This paper provides a structural explanation of the historical pattern via changes in substitutability between mother’s direct childcare and indirect market care. Analysis of a life-cycle model of married women’s labor supply and f...

Dynamic Female Labor Supply

The increase in female employment and participation rates is one of the most dramatic economic changes to have taken place during the last century. However, while the employment rate of married women more than doubled during the last fifty years, that of unmarried women remained almost constant. In order to empirically analyze these trends we divide the paper into two parts: In the first, we em...

Labor Market Activities and Fertility