based on a comparison of the sex of the parent’s previous children, it is necessary to include only individuals with two or more children. Secondly, mothers with children older than 18 years old at the time of the survey are also excluded from the sample. This restriction ensures that the first child has not yet moved from home at the time of the survey.<sup>10</sup> Additionally, mothers with a child below the age of 1 are also excluded from the analysis in order to avoid potential bias due to lower labor market activity of mothers during the initial months following childbirth.

Taking into account these restrictions, with these four surveys I construct two repeated-cross section subsamples. The first includes mothers with two or more children whose oldest child is younger than 18 years old. The second includes fathers (husbands of the married mothers) with two or more children whose oldest child is younger than 18 years old. I do not carry out a separate analysis on the subsample of married women because in my final sample the married women represent 98% of the total (see Table 2), which makes no significant difference with respect to the whole sample. Thus, the final samples are made up of 7,480 observations of mothers and 5,496 observations of fathers with at least two children under the age of 18.<sup>11</sup>

# **4.1 Descriptive Statistics**

Descriptive statistics for mothers’ fertility in Albania are given in Table 1. As the independent variable of primary interest for this analysis is fertility, the variable _number of children ever born per mother_ is used as a measure of fertility.<sup>12</sup> Using the sex of the oldest two children, I define the siblings sex composition pairs as _same sex_ if they have the same gender and _mixed sex_ if otherwise. The former is also decomposed to define sibling pairs of _two girls_ and _two boys_ .

Table 1 indicates that the average number of children ever born for Albanian mothers with at least two children is 2,60. Some families have as many as 9 children. Among all mothers with two children, about 41% considered having a third child, an event indicated by the variable _More than 2 children_ . Both the number of children and the proportion of mothers with three or more children are quite similar to other studies in the literature (e.g. Angrist and Evans, 1998). Moreover, just 50% of the households with at least two children had either a girl or a boy as a firstborn and also just 50% of all two child households had children of the same sex. However, the occurrence of two boys in a row is slightly higher (25%) than the occurrence of two girls

> 10In Albania, it is increasingly likely for a child over 18 years old to have moved to a different household. For instance, using the LSMS surveys, which provide information on the sons and daughters who have left the household, I find that the average age at which a child in Albania left his home is 23.66 during the period studied. Moreover, the age at which a child left the household is quite different between males and females. For example, the average age at which a girl left home is 21.92 years old, while for boys it is 25.41. These descriptive statistics indicate that Albanian girls leave their homes quite earlier compared to boys and this is generally due to marriage.

> 11It is important to note that the difference in observations between the married mothers (7,480) and the married fathers (5,496) is due to the number of observations as provided in the official 2008-09 Albanian DHS. In other words, there are more observations of women than men. A detailed description of the LSMS surveys and the DHS survey for Albania and on the construction of the subsamples and some key variables is provided in appendix A. See Table A-1 in the Appendix for more information.

> 12This measure of fertility, _number of children ever born_ , also includes the deceased children.

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