In this paper we investigate how fertility decisions respond to unexpected career interruptions which occur as a consequence of job displacement. Using an event study approach we compare the birth rates of displaced women with those of women unaffected by job loss after establishing the pre-displacement comparability of these groups. Our results reveal that job displacement reduces average fert...

Obesity may not only be linked to undesirable health outcomes but also to limitations in sexual life. The present paper aims to assess whether there is a relationship between weight change and sexual activity in obese individuals. To address the endogeneity of weight loss that is likely to result in biased estimation results, the analysis is based on data from a randomized controlled trial. In ...

This paper studies the design of a pay-as-you-go social security system in a society where fertility is in part stochastic and in part determined through capital investment. If parents’ investments in children are publicly observable, pension benefits must be linked positively to the the level of investment, and payroll taxes negatively to the number of children. The outcome is characterized by...

The Effectiveness of Policies that Promote Labor Force Participation of Women with Children: A Collection of National Studies Numerous countries have enacted policies to promote the labor force participation of women around the years of childbearing, and unsurprisingly, many research articles have been devoted to evaluating their effectiveness. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, six such artic...

How Does the Presence of Children Affect Dependent Care? A Psycho-Economic Approach This paper adopts a psycho-economic approach, based on the "Demonstration Effect" hypothesis, to analyze the effects that the presence of children has on the time devoted to elder care. We combine the approach of the Social Cognitive Theory and a three-generation altruism model. Using the 2003 Spanish Time Use S...

We present international evidence on the marriage market implications of cohort size growth, and set out a theoretical model of how marriage markets adjust to imbalances. Since men marry younger women, secular growth in cohort size in the second phase of the demographic transition worsens the position of women. This e¤ect has been substantial in many Asian countries earlier, and continues to be...

Parental Leave – A Policy Evaluation of the Swedish “Daddy-Month” Reform Many countries are trying to incentivize fathers to increase their share in parental leave and in household work to improve female labor market opportunities. Our unique data set stems from a natural experiment in Sweden. The data comprises all children born before (control group) and after the reform (treatment group) in ...

Shot Across the Bow, Stigma or Selection? The Effect of Repeating a Class on Educational Attainment The German practice of compelling weak students to repeat a class has come under heavy criticism recently. Many observers fear that this practice is, at best, useless or even counterproductive. However, little is known so far on the consequences of having to repeat a class, as compared to be conf...

We show that close geographical proximity to mothers or mothers-in-law has a substantial positive effect on the labor supply of married women with young children. We argue that the mechanism through which proximity increases labor supply is the availability of childcare. We interpret availability broadly enough to include not only regular scheduled childcare during work hours but also an insura...

Analysis of micro-level data reveals that changes in the minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) could induce changes in the intensity and location of alcohol consumption, sexual behavior, and teen fertility. Effects on teen fertility vary across different populations. Among 15-20 year-old non-poor whites, less restrictive legal access to alcohol decreases the probability of first pregnancy and abort...