Fertility and Female Employment: Problems of Causal Direction

Cramer, James C.

doi:10.2307/2095117

Cited by 173 publications

(77 citation statements)

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“…In addition, a larger family (income held constant) has lower money resources and less parental time for each child. Furthermore, maternal employment is highly correlated with the family's size (Cramer, 1980;Eggebeen, 1988;Stolzenberg and Waite, 1977). The result reported here is a partial effect, controlling for these other factors.…”

Section: Family Structure and Family Sizementioning

confidence: 50%

Mother or Market? Effects of Maternal Employment on the Intellectual Ability of 4-Year-Old Children

1989

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This article uses the 1986 Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data set to investigate the impact of maternal employment on children's intellectual ability, as measured at the age of 4 by using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Results from multivariate regression analysis show a statistically significant adverse effect of mother's employment on children's intellectual ability, but only for boys in higher income families. Furthermore, the negative impact was related to the timing of maternal employment: employment during the boys' infancy had a statistically significant negative effect on PPVT scores at the age of 4. This pattern was not found for girls, for children in low-income families, or for families in which mothers resumed their employment after the child's first year of life. The impact of other demographic trends in recent yearsdeclining fertility and rising marital instability-are also investigated. The results show an adverse effect of the presence of other siblings on children's PPVT scores; but holding family income constant, the effect of the parents' marital status on children's intellectual ability is not statistically significant. In addition, several family background factors are highly correlated with children's test scores. Three significant and interrelated demographic trends have dominated the social landscape in the United States for the past quarter-century: a dramatic rise in the labor force participation of mothers with young children, a pervasive decline in fertility rates (especially marital fertility rates), and a more than doubling of divorce rates and growing rates of transitory nonmarital cohabitation.

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Section: Family Structure and Family Sizementioning

confidence: 50%

Mother or Market? Effects of Maternal Employment on the Intellectual Ability of 4-Year-Old Children

1989

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“…and childless women has been termed the "family gap" and studied extensively by sociologists and economists (e.g. Cramer, 1980;Browning, 1992;Joshi et al, 1998;Waldfogel, 1998;Dankmeyer, 1996;Budig and England, 2001). Korenman and Neumark (1992) describes how unobserved heterogeneity and endogenous fertility present obstacles to drawing causal inference from cross-sectional ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

The effects of motherhood timing on career path

2009

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This paper estimates the effects of motherhood timing on female career path, using national panel data from the NLSY79, and biological fertility shocks as instrumental variables for the age at which a woman bears her first child. Motherhood delay leads to a substantial increase in career earnings, a smaller increase in wage rates, and an increase in career hours worked. The postponement wage premium is largest for college-educated women, and those in professional, managerial, and clerical occupations.Family leave laws do not significantly influence the premium. Conversely, using measured aptitude level as an instrumental variable for expected future earnings, we show that higher expected career earnings lead women to postpone childbearing.1

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“…However, fertility is also likely to influence female employment, leading to the likely causal reciprocity between the two phenomena. Indeed, even though most of employmentfertility research has addressed only one-way relationships (either employment affecting fertility or the opposite), there is evidence that there may be mutual causation between employment and fertility (Cramer 1980;Felmlee 1993). But this interdependence is far from being clearly understood, since inconsistent findings have been reported, with some studies seeing reciprocal effects (Budig 2003;Felmlee 1993) and others seeing only a one-way relationship (Hout 1978;Smith-Lovin and Tickamyer 1978).…”

Section: Prior Empirical Evidence In Developing Countriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The participation of women in the economic market is presumed to compete with their family obligations, since mothers are often the only ones responsible for household duties. Accordingly, a negative relationship is generally expected between female labour force participation and fertility at the micro level, although there is controversy about the causal direction of the relationship between the two phenomena (Cramer 1980;Felmlee 1993;Stolzenberg and Waite 1977). While a consistent negative relationship between women's paid work and fertility has been found at the micro level in developed countries (Budig 2003;Lloyd 1991), no clear pattern has emerged in developing countries (Lloyd 1991;Piché, Poirier, and Neill 1989).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of female employment on fertility in Dakar (Senegal) and Lomé (Togo)

Béguy¹

2009

DemRes

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Fertility and Female Employment: Problems of Causal Direction

Cited by 173 publications

References 0 publications

Mother or Market? Effects of Maternal Employment on the Intellectual Ability of 4-Year-Old Children

Mother or Market? Effects of Maternal Employment on the Intellectual Ability of 4-Year-Old Children

The effects of motherhood timing on career path

The impact of female employment on fertility in Dakar (Senegal) and Lomé (Togo)

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