Gender equality as a confounder in the epidemiological approach

Miriam Beblo (), Luise Goerges () and Eva Markowsky
Additional contact information
Miriam Beblo: Universität Hamburg
Luise Goerges: LISER Luxembourg

Economics Bulletin, 2020, vol. 40, issue 2, 1292-1299

Abstract: A rapidly growing literature uses the epidemiological approach (Fernández & Fogli, 2009) to explore the impact of "culture" on economic behavior in a wide variety of geographical contexts. To better understand potential threats to identification, we apply the method to a recent European data set. We find that proxies of country-of-origin culture affect second-generation immigrant women`s labor force participation and fertility in Europe. The effect is economically and statistically significant among women descending from countries in which gender equality is relatively high, but it is far less pronounced or absent among women descending from low gender equality countries. These findings suggest that parental selection into migration, as well as intergenerational spillover effects, are important confounders in applications of the epidemiological approach.

Keywords: Culture economics; labor force participation; fertility; epidemiological approach; selective migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F2 J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2020/Volume40/EB-20-V40-I2-P110.pdf (application/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:ebl:ecbull:eb-19-01065

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economics Bulletin from AccessEcon
Bibliographic data for series maintained by John P. Conley ().