Suffer the Little Children: Measuring the Effects of Parenthood on Well-Being Worldwide

Luca Stanca

No 173, Working Papers from University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper tests the rational-choice approach to fertility decisions by investigating the relationship between parenthood and well-being in a large sample of individuals from 94 countries. We find that world- wide, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, having children has a negative effect on well-being. Conditioning on age, gender, marital status and education can only partially help to interpret this finding. We show that the negative effect of parent- hood on well-being is explained by a large adverse impact on financial satisfaction, that on average dominates the positive impact on non- financial satisfaction. The results are robust to alternative empirical specifications and to the inclusion of the reported ideal number of children as a proxy variable to address the endogeneity of parenthood decisions.

Keywords: well-being; fertility; children; decision-making (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 D10 D61 I31 J17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2009-10, Revised 2009-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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http://repec.dems.unimib.it/repec/pdf/mibwpaper173.pdf First version, 2009 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Suffer the little children: Measuring the effects of parenthood on well-being worldwide (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mib:wpaper:173

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