The Impact of Fertility on Mothers' Labour Supply in Australia: Evidence from Exogenous Variation in Family Size

Julie Moschion ()

Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series from Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne

Abstract: This paper estimates the impact of fertility on mothers’ labour supply in Australia, using exogenous variation in family size generated by twin births and the gender mix of siblings. Results show that having more than one child decreases labour market participation by 15.5 percentage points and hours worked by around 6 hours per week. Having more than two children reduces labour market participation by between 12 and 20 percentage points and hours worked by between 3 and 8 hours a week, depending on the instrument used. Interestingly, fathers also reduce both their labour market participation (by 10 percentage points) and their number of hours worked per week (by 4 hours) when having more than one child. Compared with the results obtained with the same methodology for other countries, the effects for Australia are large, which partly reflects the constraints on public childcare and the lack of a national paid parental leave scheme prior to 2011.

Keywords: Fertility; labour market participation; Australia; family policies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2011-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/downloads ... series/wp2011n17.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Impact of Fertility on Mothers' Labour Supply in Australia: Evidence from Exogenous Variation in Family Size (2013)
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:iae:iaewps:wp2011n17

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series from Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sheri Carnegie ().