Alice Schoonbroodt | The University of Iowa (original) (raw)

Papers by Alice Schoonbroodt

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2011

In a risk-sharing dynastic model, Hosseini, Jones, and Shourideh (2009) find that fertility shoul... more In a risk-sharing dynastic model, Hosseini, Jones, and Shourideh (2009) find that fertility should be negatively related to ability. However, they only consider the case

The Barro-Becker model is a simple intuitive model of fertility choice. In its original formulati... more The Barro-Becker model is a simple intuitive model of fertility choice. In its original formulation, however, it has not been very successful at reproducing the changes in fertility choice in response to decreased mortality and increased income growth that demographers have emphasized in explaining the demographic transition. In this paper we show that this is due to an implicit assumption that number and utility of children are complements, which is a byproduct of the high intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES) typically assumed in the fertility literature. We show that, not only is this assumption not necessary, but both the qualitative and quantitative properties of the model in terms of fertility choice change dramatically when substitutability and high curvature are assumed. To do so, we first derive analytical comparative statics and perform quantitative experiments. We find that if IES is less than one, model predictions of changes in fertility amount to about two-thirds of those observed in U.S. data since 1800. There are two major sources to these predicted changes, the increase in the growth rate of productivity which accounts for about 90 percent of the predicted fall in fertility before 1880, and changes in mortality which account for 90 percent of the predicted change from 1880 to 1950.

Journal of Human Capital, 2022

Research Papers in Economics, Aug 31, 2005

After the fall in fertility during the Demographic Transition, many developed countries experienc... more After the fall in fertility during the Demographic Transition, many developed countries experienced a baby bust, followed by the Baby Boom and subsequently a return to low fertility. Received wisdom from the Demography literature links these large fluctuations in fertility to the series of Economics 'shocks' that occurred with similar timing-the Great Depression, WWII, the economic expansion that followed and then the productivity slow down of the 1970's. To economists, this line of argument suggests a more general link between fluctuations in output and fertility decisions, of which the Baby-Bust-Boom-Bust event (BBB) is a particularly stark example. This paper is an attempt to formalize the conventional wisdom in simple versions of stochastic growth models with endogenous fertility. First, we develop initial tools to address the effects of "temporary" shocks to productivity on fertility choices. Second, we analyze calibrated versions of these models. We can then answer several qualitative and quantitative questions: Under what conditions is fertility pro-or countercyclical? How large are these effects and how is this related to the 'persistence' of the shocks? How much of the BBB can be accounted for by the kinds of medium run productivity fluctuations described as computed from the data? Preliminary results show that under reasonable parameter values fertility is procyclical, that the elasticity of fertility to shocks lays between 1 and 1.7 and, finally, that in our models, productivity shocks capture between 1/3 and 2/3 of the US baby bust and between 1 4 and 1 2 of the US baby boom. * The authors thank the National Science Foundation and the Spanish Ministry of Education, under grants BEC2002-04294-C02-01 and SEC2005-08793-C04-01 for financial support. We also thank Henry Siu and participants at SITE 2005 Conference on The Household Nexus and the Macroeconomy for helpful comments.

their valuable comments and for making their data available to us and Anderson Schneider for valu... more their valuable comments and for making their data available to us and Anderson Schneider for valuable research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

We thank Todd Schoellman, John Knowles, and the participants at the NBER pre-conference in Boston... more We thank Todd Schoellman, John Knowles, and the participants at the NBER pre-conference in Boston, the Stanford Junior Faculty Bag Lunch, and the Economics and Demography conference in Napa California for helpful suggestions. We thank Amalia Miller in particular for a thoughtful discussion. Financial

After the fall in fertility during the Demographic Transition, many devel-oped countries experien... more After the fall in fertility during the Demographic Transition, many devel-oped countries experienced a baby bust, followed by the Baby Boom and subse-quently a return to low fertility. Received wisdom from the Demography litera-ture links these large fluctuations in fertility to the series of Economics ’shocks’ that occurred with similar timing — the Great Depression, WWII, the economic expansion that followed and then the productivity slow down of the 1970’s. To economists, this line of argument suggests a more general link between fluc-tuations in output and fertility decisions, of which the Baby-Bust-Boom-Bust event (BBB) is a particularly stark example. This paper is an attempt to for-malize the conventional wisdom in simple versions of stochastic growth models with endogenous fertility. First, we develop initial tools to address the effects of ”temporary ” shocks to productivity on fertility choices. Second, we analyze calibrated versions of these models. We can then answer sev...

Preliminary and incomplete – do not circulate Most countries seem to have experienced a shift in ... more Preliminary and incomplete – do not circulate Most countries seem to have experienced a shift in the property rights over children. While two centuries ago parents had extensive control over their chil-dren, laws have been implemented in many countries to curb these control rights and thereby essentially led to the self-ownership of children. In this paper, we first document these changes, then argue that the property right allocation alters the incentive to have children, and thereby may have contributed to the decline in fertility observed in the data. Further, we show that the lack of property rights that parents have over children today may indeed lead to inefficiently low fertility levels. This is an interesting break-down of Coase’s theorem, and we provide a de-tailed analysis of the mechanism responsible for the break-down. This mechanism holds in a variety of environments: with altruism, overlapping lives, heterogene-ity, infinite horizons. Finally, we address two additional...

Is there an economic rationale for pronatalist policies? In this paper we propose and analyze a p... more Is there an economic rationale for pronatalist policies? In this paper we propose and analyze a particular market failure that may lead to inefficiently low equilib-rium fertility and therefore to a need for government intervention. The friction we investigate is related to the ownership of children. If parents have no claim on their children’s income, then the private benefit from producing a child may be smaller than the social benefit. We present an overlapping-generations (OLG) model with fertility choice and altruism, and model ownership by introducing a minimum constraint on transfers from parents to children. Using the efficiency concepts proposed in Golosov, Jones, and Tertilt (2007), we find that whenever the transfer floor is binding, fertility choices are inefficient. We show how this inef-ficiency relates to dynamic inefficiency in standard OLG models with exogenous fertility and Millian efficiency in models with endogenous fertility. In particular, we show that the usua...

Demographers emphasize decreased mortality and ‘economic development ’ as the main contributors g... more Demographers emphasize decreased mortality and ‘economic development ’ as the main contributors generating the demographic transition. Contrary to previous find-ings, we show that simple dynastic models a ̀ la Barro-Becker can reproduce observed changes in fertility in response to decreased mortality and increased productivity growth if the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is low enough. We show that this is largely due to number and welfare of children being substitutes in the utility of parents in this case. We find that with an IES of one-third, model predictions of changes in fertility amount to two-thirds of those observed in U.S. data since 1800.

After the fall in fertility during the demographic transition, many developed countries experienc... more After the fall in fertility during the demographic transition, many developed countries experienced a baby bust, followed by the baby boom and subsequently a return to low fertility (BBB event). Demographers have linked these large fluctuations in fertility to the series of ‘economic shocks ’ that occurred with similar timing – the Great Depression, World War II (WWII), the economic expansion that followed and then the productivity slow down of the 1970s. This paper formalizes a more general link between fluctuations in output and fertility decisions, in simple versions of stochastic growth models with endogenous fertility. First, we develop initial tools to address the effects of ‘temporary ’ shocks to productivity on fertility choices. Second, we analyze calibrated versions of these models. Qualitatively, results show that under reasonable parameter values fertility is pro-cyclical. Moreover, following a deviation in fertility (due to a productivity shock, for example) sets off an...

The Barro-Becker model is a simple intuitive model of fertility choice. In its original formulati... more The Barro-Becker model is a simple intuitive model of fertility choice. In its original formulation, however, it has not been very successful at reproducing the changes in fertility choice in response to decreased mortality and increased income growth that demographers have emphasized in explaining the demographic transition. In this paper we show that both the qualitative and quantitative properties of the model in terms of Balanced Growth Path fertility choice are highly sensitive to the choice of intertemporal elasticity of substitution in consumption (IES). We give ana-lytic comparative statics results to show that this is partly due to the implied desire to smooth consumption across generations and partly due to an implicit assumption about substitutability (low elasticity) vs. complementarity (high elasticity) between fertility and future consumption. In versions of the model in which the IES is set to a level common in the RBC literature (less than one) as opposed to levels c...

This paper studies the quantitative effects of changes in fertility patterns and relative wages, ... more This paper studies the quantitative effects of changes in fertility patterns and relative wages, on changes in employment of married women born between 1940 and 1960. We explore three channels linking these factors to employment decisions in a life-cycle model with experience accumulation. First, because child-rearing is intensive in women’s time, employment at childbearing ages increases as fertility is reduced. Second, if women have children later, they reach the childbearing age with more experience, thereby increasing their incentive to remain employed when having children. Third, a decrease in the gender wage gap, ceteris paribus, makes working more attractive, which feeds back on employment decisions later in life because of experience accumulation. After calibrating the model to the life-cycle facts characterizing the 1940 cohort, we find that the decrease in fertility levels has a minor effect on employment. However, the change in the timing of births has a large effect on e...

Further, a combination of shifts in children's market opportunities and the introduction of P... more Further, a combination of shifts in children's market opportunities and the introduction of PAYG social security may help account for fertility patterns, living arrangements and intergenerational wealth flows over the past two centuries. The theoretical model we have in mind shows that the optimal living arrangement until the beginning of the 19th century may have been the farm and community based extended family in which parents had full control over their adult children, high fertility would follow naturally. During the 19th and early 20th century, child labor and compulsory education policies were introduced while adult children's outside options (in emerging labor markets) increased significantly, which coincided with the fertility decline and an initial increase in education levels. The model also replicates this pattern. Given young adults' increasing opportunities, parents and children may then have agreed to separate, the parent thereby foregoing transfers from t...

Parental control over offspring has changed dramatically in Western societies. From a state, befo... more Parental control over offspring has changed dramatically in Western societies. From a state, before the 19th century, where parents completely controlled their children far into adulthood, a series of laws have shifted these control rights to the current state where even younger children control many aspects of their own lives. We first document the laws that gave parents all the control and argue that these control rights, directly or indirectly, gave parents access to a large fraction of their offspring’s labor income if they so desired. This paper argues that the shift in property rights that followed has important implications for fertility choice. In a simple overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility and altruism, we show that the first-order effect of such a shift is a decrease in fertility—contributing to the decline in fertility during the demographic transition. Depending on the cost structure of children, this decrease may be followed by an increase in fe...

In the demography literature, the large 20th century fluctuations in fertility have often been li... more In the demography literature, the large 20th century fluctuations in fertility have often been linked to the series of ‘economic shocks’ that occurred with similar timing – the Great Depression, World War II (WWII), the economic expansion that followed and then the productivity slow down of the 1970s. This paper formalizes these ideas in a stochastic growth model with endogenous fertility. In this model we study the effects of productivity shocks as well as one-time shocks to capital-people (labor) ratios (a combination of mortality, depreciation and war capital built-ups) on fertility levels. We first show that a ‘catching-up’ phenomenon occurs. The idea, though, is different from the one advanced by most demographers. There will be catching up, not because of previously low fertility rates per se, but because of off balanced growth dynamics in capital-people ratios. Next, we show that this model exhibits pro-cyclical fertility in most cases. Using data on U.S. TFP and capitalpeopl...

Over the period from 1964 to 2003, married female employment almost doubled from 40 per cent in 1... more Over the period from 1964 to 2003, married female employment almost doubled from 40 per cent in 1964 to 71 per cent in 2003. Disaggregated by age and education, changes were most pronounced during childbearing ages and increasing in education levels. At the same time, age at birth of first child as well as life-cycle wage profiles have increased the most for highly educated women. Given those facts, our purpose is that of ”testing” if theories of the determinants of female labor supply are robust to a life-cycle representation of the fertility and labor supply choice, and, in the affirmative case, how much of the data from the last fifty years they capture. To this end, we build a quantitative life-cycle model of female labor force participation and child related choices with experience accumulation. First, we calibrate the model to the 1940 cohort’s lifecycle participation, wages and distribution of completed fertility. Then, we investigate how much of the observed changes in behav...

We study the quantitative eects of changes in timing of births, the decrease in fertility levels,... more We study the quantitative eects of changes in timing of births, the decrease in fertility levels, and the increase in the relative wage of women to men, in levels and returns to experience, on life-cycle labor supply decisions of married women born between 1940 and 1960. We explore the following channels linking participation and these three determinants in a quantitative life-cycle model with experience accumulation. First, assuming that raising children is intensive in women’s time, participation by number of children is decreasing, and thus, average participation at childbearing ages increases when women have fewer children. Second, following a delay in timing of births, women accumulate more work experience before childbearing, and therefore, are less likely to drop out of labor markets when having children. Third, a decrease in the gender wage gap, at any given age and for any given number of children, increases participation and this eect is magnified later on in life through ...

Abstract In this chapter we revisit the relationship between income and fertility. There is overw... more Abstract In this chapter we revisit the relationship between income and fertility. There is overwhelming empirical evidence that fertility is negatively related to income in most countries at most times. Several theories have been proposed in the literature to explain ...

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2011

In a risk-sharing dynastic model, Hosseini, Jones, and Shourideh (2009) find that fertility shoul... more In a risk-sharing dynastic model, Hosseini, Jones, and Shourideh (2009) find that fertility should be negatively related to ability. However, they only consider the case

The Barro-Becker model is a simple intuitive model of fertility choice. In its original formulati... more The Barro-Becker model is a simple intuitive model of fertility choice. In its original formulation, however, it has not been very successful at reproducing the changes in fertility choice in response to decreased mortality and increased income growth that demographers have emphasized in explaining the demographic transition. In this paper we show that this is due to an implicit assumption that number and utility of children are complements, which is a byproduct of the high intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES) typically assumed in the fertility literature. We show that, not only is this assumption not necessary, but both the qualitative and quantitative properties of the model in terms of fertility choice change dramatically when substitutability and high curvature are assumed. To do so, we first derive analytical comparative statics and perform quantitative experiments. We find that if IES is less than one, model predictions of changes in fertility amount to about two-thirds of those observed in U.S. data since 1800. There are two major sources to these predicted changes, the increase in the growth rate of productivity which accounts for about 90 percent of the predicted fall in fertility before 1880, and changes in mortality which account for 90 percent of the predicted change from 1880 to 1950.

Journal of Human Capital, 2022

Research Papers in Economics, Aug 31, 2005

After the fall in fertility during the Demographic Transition, many developed countries experienc... more After the fall in fertility during the Demographic Transition, many developed countries experienced a baby bust, followed by the Baby Boom and subsequently a return to low fertility. Received wisdom from the Demography literature links these large fluctuations in fertility to the series of Economics 'shocks' that occurred with similar timing-the Great Depression, WWII, the economic expansion that followed and then the productivity slow down of the 1970's. To economists, this line of argument suggests a more general link between fluctuations in output and fertility decisions, of which the Baby-Bust-Boom-Bust event (BBB) is a particularly stark example. This paper is an attempt to formalize the conventional wisdom in simple versions of stochastic growth models with endogenous fertility. First, we develop initial tools to address the effects of "temporary" shocks to productivity on fertility choices. Second, we analyze calibrated versions of these models. We can then answer several qualitative and quantitative questions: Under what conditions is fertility pro-or countercyclical? How large are these effects and how is this related to the 'persistence' of the shocks? How much of the BBB can be accounted for by the kinds of medium run productivity fluctuations described as computed from the data? Preliminary results show that under reasonable parameter values fertility is procyclical, that the elasticity of fertility to shocks lays between 1 and 1.7 and, finally, that in our models, productivity shocks capture between 1/3 and 2/3 of the US baby bust and between 1 4 and 1 2 of the US baby boom. * The authors thank the National Science Foundation and the Spanish Ministry of Education, under grants BEC2002-04294-C02-01 and SEC2005-08793-C04-01 for financial support. We also thank Henry Siu and participants at SITE 2005 Conference on The Household Nexus and the Macroeconomy for helpful comments.

their valuable comments and for making their data available to us and Anderson Schneider for valu... more their valuable comments and for making their data available to us and Anderson Schneider for valuable research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

We thank Todd Schoellman, John Knowles, and the participants at the NBER pre-conference in Boston... more We thank Todd Schoellman, John Knowles, and the participants at the NBER pre-conference in Boston, the Stanford Junior Faculty Bag Lunch, and the Economics and Demography conference in Napa California for helpful suggestions. We thank Amalia Miller in particular for a thoughtful discussion. Financial

After the fall in fertility during the Demographic Transition, many devel-oped countries experien... more After the fall in fertility during the Demographic Transition, many devel-oped countries experienced a baby bust, followed by the Baby Boom and subse-quently a return to low fertility. Received wisdom from the Demography litera-ture links these large fluctuations in fertility to the series of Economics ’shocks’ that occurred with similar timing — the Great Depression, WWII, the economic expansion that followed and then the productivity slow down of the 1970’s. To economists, this line of argument suggests a more general link between fluc-tuations in output and fertility decisions, of which the Baby-Bust-Boom-Bust event (BBB) is a particularly stark example. This paper is an attempt to for-malize the conventional wisdom in simple versions of stochastic growth models with endogenous fertility. First, we develop initial tools to address the effects of ”temporary ” shocks to productivity on fertility choices. Second, we analyze calibrated versions of these models. We can then answer sev...

Preliminary and incomplete – do not circulate Most countries seem to have experienced a shift in ... more Preliminary and incomplete – do not circulate Most countries seem to have experienced a shift in the property rights over children. While two centuries ago parents had extensive control over their chil-dren, laws have been implemented in many countries to curb these control rights and thereby essentially led to the self-ownership of children. In this paper, we first document these changes, then argue that the property right allocation alters the incentive to have children, and thereby may have contributed to the decline in fertility observed in the data. Further, we show that the lack of property rights that parents have over children today may indeed lead to inefficiently low fertility levels. This is an interesting break-down of Coase’s theorem, and we provide a de-tailed analysis of the mechanism responsible for the break-down. This mechanism holds in a variety of environments: with altruism, overlapping lives, heterogene-ity, infinite horizons. Finally, we address two additional...

Is there an economic rationale for pronatalist policies? In this paper we propose and analyze a p... more Is there an economic rationale for pronatalist policies? In this paper we propose and analyze a particular market failure that may lead to inefficiently low equilib-rium fertility and therefore to a need for government intervention. The friction we investigate is related to the ownership of children. If parents have no claim on their children’s income, then the private benefit from producing a child may be smaller than the social benefit. We present an overlapping-generations (OLG) model with fertility choice and altruism, and model ownership by introducing a minimum constraint on transfers from parents to children. Using the efficiency concepts proposed in Golosov, Jones, and Tertilt (2007), we find that whenever the transfer floor is binding, fertility choices are inefficient. We show how this inef-ficiency relates to dynamic inefficiency in standard OLG models with exogenous fertility and Millian efficiency in models with endogenous fertility. In particular, we show that the usua...

Demographers emphasize decreased mortality and ‘economic development ’ as the main contributors g... more Demographers emphasize decreased mortality and ‘economic development ’ as the main contributors generating the demographic transition. Contrary to previous find-ings, we show that simple dynastic models a ̀ la Barro-Becker can reproduce observed changes in fertility in response to decreased mortality and increased productivity growth if the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is low enough. We show that this is largely due to number and welfare of children being substitutes in the utility of parents in this case. We find that with an IES of one-third, model predictions of changes in fertility amount to two-thirds of those observed in U.S. data since 1800.

After the fall in fertility during the demographic transition, many developed countries experienc... more After the fall in fertility during the demographic transition, many developed countries experienced a baby bust, followed by the baby boom and subsequently a return to low fertility (BBB event). Demographers have linked these large fluctuations in fertility to the series of ‘economic shocks ’ that occurred with similar timing – the Great Depression, World War II (WWII), the economic expansion that followed and then the productivity slow down of the 1970s. This paper formalizes a more general link between fluctuations in output and fertility decisions, in simple versions of stochastic growth models with endogenous fertility. First, we develop initial tools to address the effects of ‘temporary ’ shocks to productivity on fertility choices. Second, we analyze calibrated versions of these models. Qualitatively, results show that under reasonable parameter values fertility is pro-cyclical. Moreover, following a deviation in fertility (due to a productivity shock, for example) sets off an...

The Barro-Becker model is a simple intuitive model of fertility choice. In its original formulati... more The Barro-Becker model is a simple intuitive model of fertility choice. In its original formulation, however, it has not been very successful at reproducing the changes in fertility choice in response to decreased mortality and increased income growth that demographers have emphasized in explaining the demographic transition. In this paper we show that both the qualitative and quantitative properties of the model in terms of Balanced Growth Path fertility choice are highly sensitive to the choice of intertemporal elasticity of substitution in consumption (IES). We give ana-lytic comparative statics results to show that this is partly due to the implied desire to smooth consumption across generations and partly due to an implicit assumption about substitutability (low elasticity) vs. complementarity (high elasticity) between fertility and future consumption. In versions of the model in which the IES is set to a level common in the RBC literature (less than one) as opposed to levels c...

This paper studies the quantitative effects of changes in fertility patterns and relative wages, ... more This paper studies the quantitative effects of changes in fertility patterns and relative wages, on changes in employment of married women born between 1940 and 1960. We explore three channels linking these factors to employment decisions in a life-cycle model with experience accumulation. First, because child-rearing is intensive in women’s time, employment at childbearing ages increases as fertility is reduced. Second, if women have children later, they reach the childbearing age with more experience, thereby increasing their incentive to remain employed when having children. Third, a decrease in the gender wage gap, ceteris paribus, makes working more attractive, which feeds back on employment decisions later in life because of experience accumulation. After calibrating the model to the life-cycle facts characterizing the 1940 cohort, we find that the decrease in fertility levels has a minor effect on employment. However, the change in the timing of births has a large effect on e...

Further, a combination of shifts in children's market opportunities and the introduction of P... more Further, a combination of shifts in children's market opportunities and the introduction of PAYG social security may help account for fertility patterns, living arrangements and intergenerational wealth flows over the past two centuries. The theoretical model we have in mind shows that the optimal living arrangement until the beginning of the 19th century may have been the farm and community based extended family in which parents had full control over their adult children, high fertility would follow naturally. During the 19th and early 20th century, child labor and compulsory education policies were introduced while adult children's outside options (in emerging labor markets) increased significantly, which coincided with the fertility decline and an initial increase in education levels. The model also replicates this pattern. Given young adults' increasing opportunities, parents and children may then have agreed to separate, the parent thereby foregoing transfers from t...

Parental control over offspring has changed dramatically in Western societies. From a state, befo... more Parental control over offspring has changed dramatically in Western societies. From a state, before the 19th century, where parents completely controlled their children far into adulthood, a series of laws have shifted these control rights to the current state where even younger children control many aspects of their own lives. We first document the laws that gave parents all the control and argue that these control rights, directly or indirectly, gave parents access to a large fraction of their offspring’s labor income if they so desired. This paper argues that the shift in property rights that followed has important implications for fertility choice. In a simple overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility and altruism, we show that the first-order effect of such a shift is a decrease in fertility—contributing to the decline in fertility during the demographic transition. Depending on the cost structure of children, this decrease may be followed by an increase in fe...

In the demography literature, the large 20th century fluctuations in fertility have often been li... more In the demography literature, the large 20th century fluctuations in fertility have often been linked to the series of ‘economic shocks’ that occurred with similar timing – the Great Depression, World War II (WWII), the economic expansion that followed and then the productivity slow down of the 1970s. This paper formalizes these ideas in a stochastic growth model with endogenous fertility. In this model we study the effects of productivity shocks as well as one-time shocks to capital-people (labor) ratios (a combination of mortality, depreciation and war capital built-ups) on fertility levels. We first show that a ‘catching-up’ phenomenon occurs. The idea, though, is different from the one advanced by most demographers. There will be catching up, not because of previously low fertility rates per se, but because of off balanced growth dynamics in capital-people ratios. Next, we show that this model exhibits pro-cyclical fertility in most cases. Using data on U.S. TFP and capitalpeopl...

Over the period from 1964 to 2003, married female employment almost doubled from 40 per cent in 1... more Over the period from 1964 to 2003, married female employment almost doubled from 40 per cent in 1964 to 71 per cent in 2003. Disaggregated by age and education, changes were most pronounced during childbearing ages and increasing in education levels. At the same time, age at birth of first child as well as life-cycle wage profiles have increased the most for highly educated women. Given those facts, our purpose is that of ”testing” if theories of the determinants of female labor supply are robust to a life-cycle representation of the fertility and labor supply choice, and, in the affirmative case, how much of the data from the last fifty years they capture. To this end, we build a quantitative life-cycle model of female labor force participation and child related choices with experience accumulation. First, we calibrate the model to the 1940 cohort’s lifecycle participation, wages and distribution of completed fertility. Then, we investigate how much of the observed changes in behav...

We study the quantitative eects of changes in timing of births, the decrease in fertility levels,... more We study the quantitative eects of changes in timing of births, the decrease in fertility levels, and the increase in the relative wage of women to men, in levels and returns to experience, on life-cycle labor supply decisions of married women born between 1940 and 1960. We explore the following channels linking participation and these three determinants in a quantitative life-cycle model with experience accumulation. First, assuming that raising children is intensive in women’s time, participation by number of children is decreasing, and thus, average participation at childbearing ages increases when women have fewer children. Second, following a delay in timing of births, women accumulate more work experience before childbearing, and therefore, are less likely to drop out of labor markets when having children. Third, a decrease in the gender wage gap, at any given age and for any given number of children, increases participation and this eect is magnified later on in life through ...

Abstract In this chapter we revisit the relationship between income and fertility. There is overw... more Abstract In this chapter we revisit the relationship between income and fertility. There is overwhelming empirical evidence that fertility is negatively related to income in most countries at most times. Several theories have been proposed in the literature to explain ...