Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/67317
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 6933
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We estimate the causal relationship between family size and labour market outcomes for families in low fertility and low female employment regime. Family size is instrumented using twinning and gender composition of the first two children. Among families with at least one child we identify the average causal effect of an additional child on mother's employment to be -7.1 percentage points. However, we find no effect of additional children on female employment among families with two or more kids. Heterogeneity analysis suggests no causal effects of fertility on female employment among mothers with less than college education and older mothers (born before 1978). Furthermore, we find evidence for the interaction of family size with maternal education and age. An unintuitive feature of our finding is that we identify a positive bias of OLS estimates for highly educated mothers and for mothers born after 1977.
Subjects: 
labour supply
family size
female employment
JEL: 
J13
J22
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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