Bargaining over Babies

Fabian Kindermann and Matthias Doepke

No 670, 2014 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: It takes a woman and a man to make a baby. This observation suggests that for a birth to take place, both parents should agree that they are better off with another child. In this paper, we first show empirically that agreement between the parents indeed makes a birth much more likely. We then build a bargaining model of fertility choice and calibrate the model to data on fertility preferences and realized fertility. The quantitative model can be used to examine how policies such as child subsidies and public provision of child care affect childbearing. Unlike a theory that abstracts from bargaining, our analysis shows that the distribution of benefits among mothers and fathers is the key determinant of a policy’s impact on fertility.

Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2014/paper_670.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:red:sed014:670

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2014 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().