Citizenship, Fertility and Parental Investment

Ciro Avitabile, Irma Clots-Figueras and Paolo Masella

CSEF Working Papers from Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy

Abstract: Citizenship rights are associated with better economic opportunities for immigrants. This paper studies how in a country with a large fraction of temporary migrants the fertility decisions of foreign citizens respond to a change in the rules that regulate child legal status at birth. The introduction of birthright citizenship in Germany, following the introduction of the new German nationality law in 2000, represented a positive shock to the returns to investment in child human capital. Consistent with Becker's "quality-quantity" model of fertility, we find that birthright citizenship leads to a reduction in immigrant fertility and an improvement in health outcomes for the children affected by the reform.

Date: 2012-02-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-mig
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Published in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2014, 6(4), 35-65

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.csef.it/WP/wp305.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Citizenship, Fertility, and Parental Investments (2014)
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:sef:csefwp:305

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSEF Working Papers from Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr. Maria Carannante ().