The Effect of a Child on Female Work when Family Planning May Fail

Pablo Lavado

Working Papers from CEMFI

Abstract: This paper develops a structural empirical model of contraception and participation choice under imperfect control of fertility, learning and unobserved heterogeneity to identify, estimate and give a behavioral content to the effect of the first born child on female labor supply. Family planning failures are exploited as sources of identification. The data are drawn from the 1995 US National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) which no one has used before for this purpose and which contains full retrospective information on participation, contraception and children. The model is estimated combining the Nested Pseudo Likelihood Estimation and the Expected-Maximization algorithm. Key factors driving the importance of the effect are education, labor market experience, child's age and preferences for leisure and children. From a policy perspective, this heterogeneity is important in designing maternity leave and child care policies. Additionally, twins and gender composition of children are used as sources of variation in the model to estimate the effect of the second and the third born child. The Average Treatment Effect (ATE) of the first is -12.4%, of the second is -5.6% and of third born child is -4.9%. Finally, based on the dynamic model a weighting procedure is proposed to understand the Local Average Treatment Effects (LATE) found in the nonstructural literature.

Keywords: Fertility; female labor supply; family planning failures; marginal treatment effects; average treatment effects; local average treatment effects; dynamic discrete choice models; conditional choice probability; unobserved heterogeneity. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm and nep-ger
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cemfi.es/ftp/wp/1405.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:cmf:wpaper:wp2014_1405

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from CEMFI Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Araceli Requerey (requerey@cemfi.es).