Increasing the credibility of the Twin birth instrument

Helmut Farbmacher, Raphael Guber and Johan Vikström ()
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Raphael Guber: Munich Center for the Economics of Aging, Max Planck Society

No 2016:10, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: Twin births are an important instrumental variable for the endogenous fertility decision. However, in many economic settings, twins are not exogenous as dizygotic twinning is known to be correlated with maternal characteristics and fertility treatments. Following the medical literature, we assume that monozygotic twins are exogenous, and construct a new instrument, which corrects for the selection bias although monozygotic twinning is usually unobserved. We use longitudinal administrative data from Sweden and US census data and show that the usual twin instrument is not only related to observed but also to unobserved determinants of economic outcomes, while our new instrument is not. We demonstrate the relevance of our new instrument in two labor market applications and find that the classical twin instrument underestimates the true negative effect of fertility on labor force participation and earnings.

Keywords: Twin birth instrument (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C26 J13 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2016-06-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2016_010

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