Fertility cost, intergenerational labor division, and female employment

Haiyue Yu, Jin Cao and Shulong Kang

No 14/2019, BOFIT Discussion Papers from Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies (BOFIT)

Abstract: This paper considers the role of grandparental childcare in China's extraordinarily high female labor-market participation rate. Indeed, the high female labor-market participation and low labor-income penalty for childbirth is all the more remarkable given the lack of public subsidies for childcare. Using a novel and high-quality dataset, we find that childcare provided by retired grandparents significantly reduces the duration of career breaks for young women and helps women remain in the labor force. We further show that well-educated urban women benefit most from grandparental childcare, especially in the first three years of the child's life before there is a possibility to enter kindergarten.

Keywords: intergenerational labor division; grandparental childcare; female employment; human capital accumulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C24 J13 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:bofitp:bdp2019_014

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