Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/250411 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 14750
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
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 low-skilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this paper we examine if immigration has 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 immigrant female workers have increased native births by a number that ranges roughly from 2 to 4 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 immigrant women has positively affected native fertility.
Subjects: 
household economics
fertility
immigrant labour
international migration
JEL: 
D12
F22
J13
J61
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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