Immigrant Supply of Marketable Child Care and Native Fertility in Italy

R. D. Mariani and Furio Rosati

No 745, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

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 lowskilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this paper we examine if the flow of immigrants as 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 newly arrived immigrant female workers have increased the number of native births by roughly 2 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 immigrants has positively affected native fertility choice.

Keywords: Household Economics; Fertility; Immigrant Labour; International Migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 F22 J13 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-int, nep-lab and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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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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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:glodps:745

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