first, childcare provided by non-parental adults (e.g. grandparents) in extended families; and, second, greater financial costs of maintaining more children.

Extended families are composed by several generations consisting of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all living nearby or in the same household. A typical example is a married couple that lives with either the husband’s or wife’s parents. Thus, if indeed the parents have help in the household from the grandparents, they might not be forced to leave the workforce when they have an additional child. Under this scenario, the effect of fertility on parental labor supply depends on the extent of substitutability between the time spent by grandparents and parents in childcare and household chores. In response to an increase in fertility, grandparents may adjust their time allocation by supplying more time in childcare and household chores and, thus, parents are freed from such tasks and not forced to drop out of the labor market.<sup>32</sup> Indeed, several demographic studies have documented the rather particular nature of the Albanian family structure, characterized by extended families (e.g. Gjon ̧ca, Aassve and Mencarini, 2008; King, Mata-Codesal and Vullnetari, 2013)<sup>33</sup> In terms of care duties, caring for one’s older parents is also strongly-felt duty in Albania. According to the long-established tradition and custom, middle-aged and elderly parents are to live with one of their sons, usually the youngest, and his wife. Indeed the youngest son is referred to as “the son of old age”, whose role and duty is to look after his parents in their later years. Moreover, to respect and care for one’s parents is not only a duty but highly honorable in Albanian society (King and Vullnetari, 2006). Therefore, in the context of Albania where extended families are quite prevalent and professional childcare is rather rare and expensive, non-parental household members such as grandparents may be the perfect candidates for taking care of the children.

Similarly, the positive labor supply effects attributable to an increase in family size can also be rationalized on the bases of greater financial costs of feeding more children. Naturally, fertility can affect parental labor supply in two directions: on the one hand, it can provoke parents to withdraw from the labor market due to child caring and higher child costs; on the other hand, given that modern child caring and child costs are assumed to be very expensive, an increase in fertility may reduce the standard of living in the household and also stimulate parents to participate in the labor market in order to finance basic expenditures on their children.

> 32Several previous studies have examined the effect of family structure on female labor supply and they have found that the presence of grandparents in the household increases the labor supply of women who have children (e.g. Wong and Levine, 1992; Sasaki, 2002; Gong and Van Soest, 2002; Maurer-Fazio et al., 2011; Compton and Pollak, 2014; Garcia-Moran and Kuehn, 2017; Posadas and Vidal-Fern ́andez, 2013; Shen, Yan and Zeng, 2016; Landman, Seitz and Steiner, 2017).

> 33During most of the 20th century, the extended family in Albania was the basic single residential unit and economic entity. Basically, it was formed by a married couple with their married sons and their offspring, as well as any unmarried daughters. The size of these families was very large, and by the end of WWII some numbered as many as 60 to 70 members (Gjon ̧ca, Aassve and Mencarini, 2008). Even though the profound post-communist transformation and emigration have started to break down this tradition, extended families with three generations are still very common in rural Albania. For instance, the datasets used in this paper indicate that around 38% of the households live in extended families. This number is slightly higher in rural areas where it increases up to 42%.

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