an empirical analysis of life cycle fertility and female labor supply this paper examines us household fertility and female labor supply over the life cycle using data from the panel study of income dynamics the authors investigate how maternal time inputs and market expenditures on offspring as well as the benefits they yield their parents vary with ages of offspring and influence female labor supply and contraceptive behavior the econometric framework combines a female labor supply model and a contraceptive choice index function it also accounts for the fact that conceptions are not perfectly controllable events using longitudinal data on married couples the authors estimate these equations and test alternative specifications of the technologies governing child care the findings suggest that while parents cannot perfectly control conceptions variations in child care costs do affect life cycle spacing of births furthermore the results demonstrate the gains of modeling the linkages between female labor supply and fertility behavior at the household level authors modified

identifying the response of fertility to financial incentives summary while using financial incentives to increase fertility has become relatively common the effects of such policies are difficult to assess we propose an identification strategy that relies on the fact that the variation in wages induces variation in benefits and tax credits among comparable households we implement our approach by estimating a discrete choice model of female participation and fertility using individual data from the french labor force survey and a detailed representation of the french tax benefit system our results suggest that financial incentives have had a significant effect on fertility decisions in france as an example we simulate the effects of an additional unconditional child credit of 150 euros per month the effects are strongest for the third child copyright 2013 john wiley sons ltd

from malthusian stagnation to modern growth this paper investigates the historical evolution of the relationship among population growth technological change and standard of living the analysis focuses on two most important differences among the malthusian regime post malthusian regime and modern growth regime these were the behavior of income per capita and the relationship between the level of income per capita and the population growth rate the modern growth regime is characterized by steady growth in both income per capita and the level of technology in the malthusian regime technological progress and population growth was glacial by modern standards and income per capita was fairly constant in contrast to the modern growth regime the relationship between per capita income and population growth in the malthusian regime was positive post malthusian regime shared one characteristic with each of the two regimes in addition this paper developed and described an endogenous growth model consistent with the above mentioned transition process

how does parental leave affect fertility and return to work evidence from two natural experiments this paper analyzes the effects of changes in the duration of paid job protected parental leave on mothers higher order fertility and postbirth labor market careers identification is based on a major austrian reform increasing the duration of parental leave from one year to two years for any child born on or after july 1 1990 we find that mothers who give birth to their first child immediately after the reform have more second children than prereform mothers and that extended parental leave significantly reduces return to work employment and earnings also decrease in the short run but not in the long run fertility and work responses vary across the population in ways suggesting that both cash transfers and job protection are relevant increasing parental leave for a future child increases fertility strongly but leaves short run postbirth careers relatively unaffected partially reversing the 1990 extension a second 1996 reform improves employment and earnings while compressing the time between births

the career costs of children this paper analyzes the life cycle career costs associated with child rearing and decomposes their eects into unearned wages as women drop out of the labor market loss of human capital and selection into more child friendly occupations we estimate a dynamic life cycle model of fertility occupational choice and labor supply using detailed survey and administrative data for germany for numerous birth cohorts across dierent regions we use this model to analyze both the male female wage gap as it evolves from labor market entry onward and the eect of pro fertility policies we show that a substantial portion of the gender wage gap is explainable by realized and expected fertility and that the long run eect of policies encouraging fertility are considerably lower than the short run eects typically estimated in the literature

incrementality of sme loan guarantees in many countries loan guarantee programs are important elements of government policy with respect to small and medium sized enterprises smes if loan guarantee schemes are to be effective a majority of firms obtaining assistance through such a scheme ought not to be able to obtain financing from existing sources a property known as incrementality or additionality this paper describes a new approach to measuring incrementality this work uses a two stage process to estimate the incrementality of loans made under the terms of the canada small business financing csbf program first a logistic regression based model of loan outcomes essentially a credit scoring model is estimated based on a large representative sample of smes the resulting model was consistent with prior expectations and exhibited high levels of goodness of fit the model was then employed to classify a sample of firms that had received loans under the terms of the loan guarantee scheme incremental loans ought to be classified as turndowns by the model hence the proportion of loan guarantee recipients that the model classified as turndowns is a direct measure of incrementality for the csbf loan guarantee program incrementality was estimated with 95 confidence as 74 8 9 0

welfare benefits and female headship in u s time series whether welfare benefits affect marriage and fertility decisions of the low income population has been the subject of much research the substantial bias in the u s welfare system toward female headed families relative to either married couples or single childless individuals provides a clear financial incentive for early nonmarital childbearing postponement of marriage divorce postponement of remarriage and other behaviors that make eligibility for welfare benefits more likely or that avoid the loss of eligibility after it has been achieved the findings in the cross sectional research literature through 1995 summarized in moffitt 1998 exhibit a clear central tendency pointing toward an effect of welfare on some aspects of family structure namely marriage and fertility however there is also agreement that the time series evidence is inconsistent with that from crosssectional data for real benefits have been falling for over 20 years while female headship has been rising moreover bringing other programs such as food stamps and medicaid into the picture helps explain rising female headship increases in the late 1960 s and early 1970 s when those programs were introduced and solidified but does less well in explaining the

private incentives and social interactions fertility puzzles in israel this paper explores how private and social incentives for fertility may have combined to produce the complex fertility pattern observed in israel in the past half century fertility has declined within some ethnic religious groups moderately increased in others and parts of the ultra orthodox jewish population have experienced a reverse fertility transition in which childbearing has increased rapidly and substantially we present a theoretical analysis of the social dynamics of fertility that shows how private preferences preferences for conformity to social norms in childbearing and piecewise linear child allowances could have combined to yield such a complex fertility pattern we then explain the identification problem that makes it so difficult to infer the actual israeli fertility process from data on completed fertility jel jel jel jel jel jel

the effect of job displacement on couples fertility decisions this paper analyzes the effects of job displacement on fertility using finnish longitudinal register data we focus on couples where one spouse has lost a job due to a plant closure and follow them for several years before and following the job loss the results show that female job loss decreases fertility for every 100 displaced females there are three fewer children born male job loss has no impact on fertility despite resulting in a stronger decrease in family income than female job loss this indicates that the income effect is not the mechanism through which job displacement influences fertility

fertility and the personal exemption implicit pronatalist policy in the united states the personal exemption in the us provides households with an income tax subsidy for each child this paper uses aggregate time series data for the us from 1913 to 1984 to estimate the impact of the tax value of the personal exemption on the aggregate birth rate the empirical results indicate that the personal exemption has a positive and significant impact on fertility and this result is robust to a variety of specifications the us therefore pursues an implicit pronatalist policy through the income tax and the empirical results indicate that the recent tax reform act of 1986 will on average increase this subsidy for fertility authors

bargaining over babies theory evidence and policy implications it takes a woman and a man to make a baby this fact suggests that for a birth to take place the parents should first agree on wanting a child using newly available data on fertility preferences and outcomes we show that indeed babies are likely to arrive only if both parents desire one and there are many couples who disagree on having babies we then build a bargaining model of fertility choice and match the model to data from a set of european countries with very low fertility rates the distribution of the burden of child care between mothers and fathers turns out to be a key determinant of fertility a policy that lowers the child care burden specifically on mothers can be more than twice as effective at increasing the fertility rate compared to a general child subsidy

changing the cost of children and fertility evidence from the israeli kibbutz prior to 1996 israelis in collective communities kibbutzim shared the costs of raising children equally this paper examines the impact of privatizing costs of children on the behavior of young couples using universal microdata on kibbutz members exploiting variation in the increase in cost sharing across kibbutzim we estimate that lifetime fertility declined by 0 65 children in the cohorts of affected parents we also examine the exit decisions of members and find that couples were most likely to leave the kibbutz if they were either higher income or lower fertility this pattern is also observed among israeli emigrants in which higher educated and lower fertility couples are more likely to leave israel

leadership and organizational justice similarities and differences across cultures international management scholars and practitioners agree that managers cannot simply assume that leadership behaviors effective in one culture can be readily transferred to other cultures this study examines the relationship of transformational leadership and leader member exchange to organizational justice and job satisfaction in five separate cultures results indicate that while there is consistent support for some of the proposed linkages there are also some interesting differences across cultures implications for theory and future research on international business are discussed

the effect of tax transfer policies on fertility in canada 1921 88 this paper estimates the effect on fertility of the personal tax exemption for children child tax credit family allowances and maternity leave benefits in canada using time series data from 1921 to 1988 it is found that the exemption child tax credit and family allowances all have significant and positive effects on fertility the results are robust to a variety of specifications including first differencing while the three tax transfer programs seem to be very distinct the null hypothesis that they have no differential effects on fertility can hardly be rejected all the results also hold for the cumulative effect of the three tax transfer programs the estimates predict that a large increase in the value of the tax transfer programs would be needed to increase fertility to the replacement level

do family wealth shocks affect fertility choices evidence from the housing market abstract this paper uses wealth changes driven by housing market variation to estimate the effect of family resources on fertility decisions using data from the panel study of income dynamics we show that a 100 000 increase in housing wealth among home owners causes a 16 to 18 increase in the probability of having a child there is no evidence of an effect of msa level housing price growth on the fertility of renters however we also present evidence that housing wealth growth increases total fertility and that the responsiveness of fertility to housing wealth has increased over time commensurate with the recent housing boom

is there an effect of incremental welfare benefits on fertility behavior a look at the family cap this analysis exploits the variation across states in the timing of policy implementation to determine if family cap policies lead to a reduction in births to women aged 15 to 34 vital statistics birth data for the years 1989 to 1998 offer no such evidence the data reject a decline in births of more than one percent the finding is robust to multiple specification checks the data also reject large declines in higher order births among demographic groups with high welfare participation rates

financial incentives and fertility using panel data on over 300 000 israeli women from 1999 to 2005 we exploit variation in israel s child subsidy to identify the impact of changes in the price of a marginal child on fertility we find a positive statistically significant and economically meaningful price effect on overall fertility and consistent with becker 1960 and becker and tomes 1976 a small effect of income on fertility which is negative at low and positive at high income levels we also find a price effect on fertility among older women suggesting that part of the overall effect is due to a reduction in total fertility

new evidence on the timing and spacing of births this is a progress report on an ongoing empirical study of the determinants of life cycle fertility the main objective of the early stage of the work is to codify the facts in a coherent statistical framework that provides the duration data analogue of the conventional simultaneous equations model after reviewing the relevant literature the authors present an empirical analysis of data on fertility marital status and work histories for 570 swedish women born between 1941 and 1945 the data are from a survey conducted by the swedish central bureau of statistics in 1981 excerpt

loan guarantee schemes in the uk the natural experiment of the enterprise finance guarantee and the 5 year rule loan guarantee schemes have existed since 1953 in the us and are widely used throughout the world to provide financial support to smaller firms by guaranteeing loans from commercial banks the uk government has been an active supporter of loan guarantees since 1981 and has a long track record of modifying its scheme to reflect changing market conditions and the financing needs of its sme sector arguably the two most significant changes occurred in 2008 when the 5 year rule on eligibility was removed and in 2009 when the long standing small firms loan guarantee scheme was replaced by the enterprise finance guarantee scheme we treat the removal of the 5 year rule as a natural policy experiment and empirically question whether on economic grounds this was a sensible policy our findings suggest that the 5 year rule was a better policy choice with regard to employment but had no impact on sales growth

informality and credit constraints evidence from sub saharan african mses abstractthe attributes of micro and small enterprises mses influencing access to credit in particular the level and role of firm informality are analysed in the article the puzzle is the push for mses to join the formal sector and the tug to avoid the extra burden it places on the firm it is important to know more clearly what forces are at work and the sources of the causal effects this study uses data from the world bank enterprise surveys for five low income countries lics in sub saharan africa the method is empirical and as we find informality to be endogenous to credit constraints an instrumental variable approach is estimated further to address the possibility of reverse causality an instrument for the informality variable is required not registered with inland revenue tax office is the chosen instrument variable the findings reveal that as the probability of a firm operating in the formal sector increases there is greater access to external credit the causality relationships are

is the small firms loan guarantee scheme hazardous for banks or helpful to small business loan guarantee schemes are an integral part of sme policy in both developed and developing countries yet little has been done to evaluate such programmes particularly in terms of their ability to correct for capital market imperfections this paper uses individual loan data from some 42 000 uk sflgs backed debt contracts to empirically test the default specification outlined in the seminal credit rationing paper of stiglitz and weiss 1981 the results show that default failure does increase with the banks cost of capital but not with the government premium in addition default appears to be determined by a whole host of other factors not typically considered in the credit rationing literature

can financial incentives reduce the baby gap evidence from a reform in maternity leave benefits abstract in this paper i assess whether earnings dependent maternity leave positively impacts fertility and narrows the baby gap between highly educated high earning and less educated low earning women i exploit a major maternity leave benefit reform in germany that considerably increased the financial incentives by up to 21 000 eur for highly educated and higher earning women using the large differential changes in maternity leave benefits across education and income groups in a differences in differences design i estimate the causal impact of the reform on fertility for up to 5 years in addition to demonstrating an up to 23 increase in the fertility of tertiary educated women i find a positive statistically significant effect of increased benefits on fertility driven mainly by women at the middle and upper end of the earnings distribution overall the results suggest that earnings dependent maternity leave benefits which compensate women according to their opportunity cost of childbearing could successfully reduce the fertility rate disparity related to mothers education and earnings

children of a policy revolution the introduction of universal child care and its effect on fertility what role does affordable and widely available public child care play for fertility we exploit a major german reform generating large temporal and spatial variation in child care coverage for children under the age of three our precise and robust estimates on birth register data reveal that increases in public child care have significant positive effects on fertility the fertility effects are more pronounced at the intensive than at the extensive margin and are not driven by changes in the timing of births or selective migration our findings inform policy makers concerned about low fertility by suggesting that universal early child care holds the promise of being an effective means of increasing birth rates

financing patterns around the world are small firms different using a firm level survey database covering 48 countries we investigate how financial and institutional development affects financing of large and small firms our database is not limited to large firms but includes small and medium size firms and data on a broad spectrum of financing sources including leasing supplier development and informal finance small firms and firms in countries with poor institutions use less external finance especially bank finance protection of property rights increases external financing of small firms significantly more than of large firms mainly due to its effect on bank finance small firms do not use disproportionately more leasing or trade finance compared with larger firms so these financing sources do not compensate for lower access to bank financing of small firms we also find that larger firms more easily expand external financing when they are constrained than small firms finally we find suggestive evidence that the pecking order holds across countries

income distribution non convexities and the fertility income relationship this paper presents a model of inequality income determination and fertility that is consistent with aggregated stylized facts and individual survey data on fertility and income it shows that indivisibilities in human capital investments limit the possibility of trade off between the quality and the quantity of children this generates a non monotonic relationship between income and fertility at the micro level on the aggregate the total fertility rate can increase or decrease with income depending on the income distribution of the population and on the private cost of education

mechanism experiments and policy evaluations randomized controlled trials are increasingly used to evaluate policies how can we make these experiments as useful as possible for policy purposes we argue greater use should be made of experiments that identify the behavioral mechanisms that are central to clearly specified policy questions what we call mechanism experiments these types of experiments can be of great policy value even if the intervention that is tested or its setting does not correspond exactly to any realistic policy option

children and their parents labor supply evidence from exogenous variation in family size although theoretical models of labor supply and the family are well developed there are few credible estimates of key empirical relationships in the work family nexus this study uses a new instrumental variable the sex composition of the first two births in families with at least two children to estimate the effect of additional children on parents labor supply in the united states instrumental variables estimates using the sex mix are substantial but smaller than the corresponding ordinary least squares ols estimates moreover unlike the ols estimates the female labor supply effects estimated using sex mix instruments appear to be absent among more educated women and women with high wage husbands we also find that married women who have a third child reduce their labor supply by as much as women in the full sample while there is no relationship between wives child bearing and husbands labor supply excerpt

subsidizing the stork new evidence on tax incentives and fertility this paper exploits the introduction of a pronatalist transfer policy in the canadian province of quebec that paid up to c 8 000 to families having a child i implement a quasi experimental strategy by forming treatment and control groups defined by time jurisdiction and family type the incentive was available broadly rather than to a narrow population as studied in previous work providing an exceptional opportunity to investigate heterogeneous responses i find a strong effect of the policy on fertility and some evidence of a heterogeneous response that may help reconcile these results with previous estimates

malthus was right after all poor relief and birth rates in southeastern england the payment of child allowances to laborers with large families was widespread in early nineteenth century england this paper tests thomas malthus s hypothesis that child allowances caused the birth rate to increase a cross sectional regression model is estimated to explain variations in birth rates across parishes in 1826 30 birth rates are found to be related to child allowances income and the availability of housing as malthus contended the paper concludes by examining the role played by the adoption of child allowances after 1795 in the fertility increase of the early nineteenth century

changing world prices women s wages and the fertility transition sweden 1860 1910 this time series analysis examines during 1860 1910 the impact of changes in local prices of agricultural commodities on wages among men and women in sweden and the impact of changes in wages on fertility decline child mortality urbanization and improved social conditions linear ordinary least squares models are set up to determine whether demand induced increases in womens wages relative to mens are significant factors in explaining swedish total fertility rates data are obtained from 25 counties and the city of stockholm among pooled observations for six time periods during 1860 64 and 1910 14 this period is marked by a total fertility decline of 28 a marital fertility decline of 26 and a child mortality decline of 52 explanatory variables are the relative prices of main agricultural outputs employment outside of agriculture the proportion of urban population and the child mortality rate findings indicate a significant relationship between child mortality and total fertility and specific fertility rates among women aged 20 39 years a doubling of the male real wage rate was significantly associated with earlier marriage higher birth rates among women aged 15 29 years and lower birth rates among women aged 35 49 years the ratio of male wages to female wages was associated with a decline in birth rates at all ages with the exception of teenagers 66 of fertility increase was due to declines in child mortality but this increase was counterbalanced by fertility decline among older women child mortality and urbanization depressed marital fertility male wages increased the proportion married a 10 increase in the male female wage rate was associated with a 25 reduction in the total fertility rate another 25 increase in the male female wage rate was associated with a 50 reduction in child mortality it is concluded that the value of womens time had a key impact on the swedish fertility transition

some evidence on the empirical significance of credit rationing this paper examines the credit rationing debate using detailed contract information on over one million commercial bank loans from 1977 to 1988 while commercial loan rates are sticky consistent with rationing this stickiness varies with loan contract terms in ways that are not predicted by equilibrium credit rationing theory in addition the proportion of new loans issued under commitment does not increase significantly when credit markets are tight despite the fact that borrowers without commitments can be rationed whereas commitment borrowers are contractually insulated from rationing overall the data suggest that equilibrium rationing is not a significant macroeconomic phenomenon

fertility and the tax benefit system a reconsideration of the theory of family taxation the author examines the simultaneous nature of the decision to have children the decision to spend money on them and the decision to seek employment it will be argued that the children income trade off emphasised by the present paper is more relevant to most family decisions than the income leisure trade off on which much of the policy debate has been centred in order to do that we shall bring together the recently developed economic theory of the family or new home economics with the microeconomic branch of the theory of public finance a model of family choice is developed the main message of the present paper is that if as the evidence suggests parents have some control over the number of children they put into the world then the effect of taxes and subsidies on the familys allocation of time and money will be generally weaker and in some respects the opposite of what it would be if the number of children were physiologically constrained or exogenously given another is that if parents derive utility from having children this has to be taken into account in any welfare calculation fertility may thus affect the design of optimal policy in two ways indirectly through its effect on market behaviour and directly through its effect on welfare excerpt

experimental evidence on returns to capital and access to finance in mexico a strong theoretical argument for focusing on access to finance is that financial market imperfections can result in large inefficiencies as firms with productive investment opportunities underinvest lack of access to finance is a frequent complaint of microenterprises which account for a large share of employment in developing countries however assessing the extent to which a lack of capital affects their business profits is complicated by the fact that business investment is likely to be correlated with a host of unmeasured characteristics of the owner and firm such as entrepreneurial ability and demand shocks in a randomized experiment that gave cash and in kind grants to small retail firms providing an exogenous shock to capital the shock generated large increases in profits with the effects concentrated among firms that were more financially constrained the estimated return to capital was at least 20 33 percent a month three to five times higher than market interest rates

welfare marital prospects and nonmarital childbearing the roles of the entitlements of the afdc program and marital prospects in the fertility and marriage choices of young women are assessed in the context of a model incorporating heritable endowment heterogeneity assortative mating concern for child quality and potential parental and public support alternatives estimates based on data describing the fertility and marital experience up to age 23 of the eight birth cohorts of women in the nlsy provide evidence that higher afdc benefit levels and lower marital prospects induce young women to choose to have a child outside of marriage

the impact of welfare on young mothers subsequent childbearing decisions the impact of welfare on fertility in the united states is explored focusing on the theory that some women have many children to increase their incomes and to prolong their stay on welfare rolls the author examines the relationship between welfare and births to women who already have a child using data on young mothers from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy i find that variations in welfare benefit levels and the incremental benefit have no statistically significant impacts on the subsequent childbearing decisions of young mothers in general nor on the subsequent childbearing decisions of women who received welfare in particular furthermore mothers who received welfare to support their first children are no more likely to have additional children in any given year through the age of 23 excerpt