Immigrant supply of marketable child care and native fertility in Italy

R.D. Mariani and Furio Rosati
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R.D. Mariani: University of Rome Tor Vergata

JODE - Journal of Demographic Economics, 2022, vol. 88, issue 4, 503-533

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%. 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: Fertility; Household economics; Immigrant labor; International migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 F22 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-12-01
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://doi.org/10.1017/dem.2021.28 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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)
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:ctl:louvde:v:88:y:2022:i:4:p:503-533

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