For Some Mothers More Than Others: How Children Matter for Labour Market Outcomes When Both Fertility and Female Employment Are Low

Krzysztof Karbownik and Michal Myck

No 6933, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We estimate the causal relationship between family size and labour market outcomes for families in low fertility and low female employment regime. Family size is instrumented using twinning and gender composition of the first two children. Among families with at least one child we identify the average causal effect of an additional child on mother's employment to be -7.1 percentage points. However, we find no effect of additional children on female employment among families with two or more kids. Heterogeneity analysis suggests no causal effects of fertility on female employment among mothers with less than college education and older mothers (born before 1978). Furthermore, we find evidence for the interaction of family size with maternal education and age. An unintuitive feature of our finding is that we identify a positive bias of OLS estimates for highly educated mothers and for mothers born after 1977.

Keywords: family size; female employment; labour supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2012-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-lma
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Forthcoming - revised version published in: Economics of Transition , 2016, 24(4), 705-725

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Related works:
Working Paper: For Some Mothers More than Others: How Children Matter for Labour Market Outcomes When Both Fertility and Female Employment Are Low (2012)
Working Paper: For some mothers more than others: how children matter for labour market outcomes when both fertility and female employment are low (2012)
Working Paper: For some mothers more than others: how children matter for labour market outcomes when both fertility and female employment are low (2012)
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