Do Highly Educated Women Choose Smaller Families?

Moshe Hazan () and Hosny Zoabi

No 275751, Foerder Institute for Economic Research Working Papers from Tel-Aviv University > Foerder Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: Conventional wisdom suggests that in developed countries income and fertility are negatively correlated. We present new evidence that between 2001 and 2009 the cross-sectional relationship between fertility and women’s education in the U.S. is U-shaped. At the same time, average hours worked increase monotonically with women’s education. This pattern is true for all women and mothers to newborns regardless of marital status. In this paper, we advance the marketization hypothesis for explaining the positive correlation between fertility and female labor supply along the educational gradient. In our model, raising children and home-making require parents’ time, which could be substituted by services bought in the market such as babysitting and housekeeping. Highly educated women substitute a significant part of their own time for market services to raise children and run their households, which enables them to have more children and work longer hours.

Keywords: Consumer/Household Economics; Financial Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42
Date: 2012-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/275751/files/13-2011.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do Highly Educated Women Choose Smaller Families? (2015)
Working Paper: Do Highly Educated Women Choose Smaller Families? (2012)
Working Paper: Do Highly Educated Women Choose Smaller Families? (2011)
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:ags:isfiwp:275751

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.275751

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Foerder Institute for Economic Research Working Papers from Tel-Aviv University > Foerder Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().