Postponement, career development and fertility rebound

Johanna Etner, Natacha Raffin and Thomas Seegmuller

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: We use an overlapping generations setup with two reproductive periods to explore how fertility decisions may differ in response to economic incentives in early and late adulthood. In particular, we analyze the interplay between fertility choices-related to career opportunities-and wages, and investigate the role played by late fertility. We show that young adults only postpone parenthood above a certain wage threshold and that late fertility increases with investment in human capital. The long run trend is either to a low productivity equilibrium, involving high early fertility, no investment in human capital and relatively low income, or to a high productivity equilibrium, where households postpone parenthood to invest in their human capital, with higher late fertility and higher levels of income. A convergence to the latter state would explain the postponement of parenthood and the fertility rebound observed in Europe in recent decades.

Keywords: fertility; postponement; reproductive health; overlapping generations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-11-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://amu.hal.science/hal-03862590
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://amu.hal.science/hal-03862590/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Postponement, career development and fertility rebound (2022)
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:hal:wpaper:hal-03862590

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().