A dilemma of fertility and female labor supply: Identification using Taiwanese twins

Junchao Zhang ()

China Economic Review, 2017, vol. 43, issue C, 47-63

Abstract: Using micro-data from the Taiwan Population and Housing Census, this study estimates the causal effect of fertility on the labor supply of married women. To address the endogeneity of fertility, we exploit exogenous variations in the number of children caused by twin births, which can be considered a natural experiment. The instrumental variable estimates indicate that an additional child reduces female employment by 10.5 percentage points for those who have at least one delivery, and the effects gradually decline for females who have two or more deliveries, with the effects vanishing when females have three or more deliveries. Also, the effect of fertility varies substantially with the time elapsed since the last childbirth, which has a consequence for differences in estimates across different samples in the literature.

Keywords: Instrumental variable; Twin; Fertility; Female employment; Taiwan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X16301675
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:chieco:v:43:y:2017:i:c:p:47-63

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2016.12.005

Access Statistics for this article

China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu

More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().