An explanation of the positive correlation between fertility and female employment across Western European countries

Tomas Kögel

Discussion Paper Series from Department of Economics, Loughborough University

Abstract: Recent literature shows the puzzling result of a positive and significant cross-country correlation between the total fertility rate and the female labour force participation rate across Western European countries. The present paper shows that this cross-country correlation becomes negative and significant, once one corrects the total fertility rate for a distortion, caused by an increasing age of childbearing, and controls in cross-country regressions for purchased child care use and female long-term unemployment. This result survives an empirical analysis in which the female labour force participation rate is treated as an endogenous variable.

Keywords: Total fertility rate; female labour force participation rate; purchased child care; female unemployment. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J10 J11 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ec/RePEc/lbo/lbowps/Fertility_puzzle.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ec/RePEc/lbo/lbowps/Fertility_puzzle.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ec/RePEc/lbo/lbowps/Fertility_puzzle.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lbo:lbowps:2006_11

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from Department of Economics, Loughborough University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Huw Edwards ().