Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/228454 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
GLO Discussion Paper No. 745
Publisher: 
Global Labor Organization (GLO), Essen
Abstract: 
The availability of child-care services has often been advocated as one of the instruments to counter the fertility decline observed in many high-income countries. In the recent past large inflows of lowskilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this paper we examine if the flow of immigrants as actually affected fertility exploiting the natural experiment occurred in Italy in 2007, when a large inflow of migrants - many of them specialized in the supply of child care - arrived unexpectedly. With a difference-in-differences method, we show that newly arrived immigrant female workers have increased the number of native births by roughly 2 per cent. We validate our result by the implementation of an instrumental variable approach and several robustness tests, all concluding that the increase in the supply of child-care services by immigrants has positively affected native fertility choice.
Subjects: 
Household Economics
Fertility
Immigrant Labour
International Migration
JEL: 
D12
F22
J13
J61
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.