The Economics of Fertility Timing: An Euler Equation Approach

David Canning, Declan French and Michael Moore

No 16-03, CHaRMS Working Papers from Centre for HeAlth Research at the Management School (CHaRMS)

Abstract: We develop a dynamic model of fertility, female labour supply and consumption to explain birth timing, particularly why more educated women delay fertility. We express the birth timing decision in an Euler equation framework by treating the probability of fertility in each period as a continuous choice variable, with actual fertility a random outcome given this probability. Within this framework, it is easy to see the effects of economic forces on fertility timing decisions. Using US data we show that women with higher levels of education delay fertility because they can accrue greater benefits from work experience.

Keywords: Births; Female labour supply; Optimisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2016-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://ftp.qub.ac.uk/pub/users/repec/qub/charms/MS_WPS_CHARMS_16_03.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server ftp.qub.ac.uk: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Economics of Fertility Timing: An Euler Equation Approach (2016)
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:qub:charms:1603

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CHaRMS Working Papers from Centre for HeAlth Research at the Management School (CHaRMS) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark McGovern ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).