Income and Fertility of Female College Graduates in the United States

Zhengyu Cai and John Winters

No 1516, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: Fertility rates have fallen below replacement levels in many economies. We examine the relationship between female incomes and fertility for college graduates in the United States. Female income is likely endogenous to fertility, and candidate instrumental variables are likely imperfect. We use the Nevo and Rosen (2012) imperfect instrumental variable procedure to estimate two-sided bounds for the effect of female income on fertility. The effect of female income on fertility is unambiguously negative and non-trivial, but the magnitude is relatively small. Our results suggest that the recent fertility slowdown in the U.S. is not primarily due to higher female incomes.

Keywords: fertility; children; motherhood; female income (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/305200/1/GLO-DP-1516.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Income and Fertility of Female College Graduates in the United States (2024)
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:zbw:glodps:1516

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().