Immigrant Supply of Marketable Child Care and Native Fertility in Italy

Rama Dasi Mariani () and Furio Rosati
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Rama Dasi Mariani: Roma Tre University

No 14750, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The availability of child-care services has often been advocated as one of the instruments to counter the fertility decline observed in many high-income countries. In the recent past large inflows of low-skilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this paper we examine if immigration has actually affected fertility exploiting the natural experiment occurred in Italy in 2007, when a large inflow of migrants – many of them specialized in the supply of child care – arrived unexpectedly. With a difference-in-differences method, we show that immigrant female workers have increased native births by a number that ranges roughly from 2 to 4 per cent. We validate our result by the implementation of an instrumental variable approach and several robustness tests, all concluding that the increase in the supply of child-care services by immigrant women has positively affected native fertility.

Keywords: immigrant labour; fertility; household economics; international migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 F22 J13 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2021-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-int and nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Journal of Demographic Economics, 2022, 88 (4), 503 - 533

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Related works:
Journal Article: Immigrant supply of marketable child care and native fertility in Italy (2022)
Journal Article: Immigrant supply of marketable child care and native fertility in Italy (2022)
Working Paper: Immigrant Supply of Marketable Child Care and Native Fertility in Italy (2021)
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