 Can child allowances improve fertility in a gender discrimination economy?Ruiting Wang and Gang Xu Economic Modelling, 2020, vol. 93, issue C, 162-174 Abstract: While it is believed that child allowances can improve fertility in principle, this paper shows that the effects of child allowances with gender discrimination should be reconsidered. It points out that gender wage discrimination can inhibit the positive effects of child allowances on fertility. With high gender wage discrimination, assuming that both parental time and market childcare goods are indispensable for childrearing, child allowances significantly increase maternal childcare time. On the other hand, child allowances also reduce childcare expenditure due to the decline in female labor time and increase in the relative price of market childcare goods, which eventually decreases fertility. We show that when the gender discrimination factor is greater than a certain cutoff, the effects of child allowances on fertility become negative. Moreover, male childcare time also plays an essential role in increasing fertility rates. Therefore, gender equality is a prerequisite for increased child allowances to be effective. Keywords: Child allowances; Gender wage discrimination; Female time allocation; Fertility; Economic growth (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:93:y:2020:i:c:p:162-174 DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2020.08.002 Access Statistics for this article Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier |
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