The effect of the timing and spacing of births on the level of labor market involvement of married women

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S ABSTRACT The Effect of the Timing and Spacing of Births on the Level of Labor Market Involvement of Married WomenWe use panel data from NLSY79 to analyze the effects of the timing and spacing of births on the labor supply of married women in a framework that accounts for the endogeneity of labor market and fertility decisions, the heterogeneity of the effects of children and their correlation with the fertility decisions, and the correlation of sequential labor market decisions. Our results show that timing and spacing of births are important determinants of the effect of children on women's labor supply. Delaying the first birth leads to higher levels of labor market involvement before the birth of the first child and reduces the negative effect of the first child on the level of labor market involvement. Having the second birth after a longer interval reduces the effect of the second child on participation but increases its effect on the probability of working full time, as more women, having returned to work, respond to the second birth by moving from full time to part time jobs. Individual heterogeneity plays an important role in the relationship between labor market and fertility decisions. Women who have fewer children have the first birth later in life and space subsequent births more closely together, work more before the birth of the first child, but face larger effects of children on their labor supply.JEL Classification: C11, C15, J13, J22

Fertility postponement and labor market outcomes

“…A more structured way of investigating the issue is by simultaneously modeling both labor market involvement and fertility (timing and spacing of births) and their reciprocal interactions [6]. Again using data from the US 1979 Youth Survey, the study concludes that postponing first childbirth leads to higher pre-childbirth human capital accumulation and reduces the negative effect of the first child on the mother's labor market participation.…”

Delayed First Birth and New Mothers’ Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Biological Fertility Shocks

“…Ammuedo-Dorantes and Kimmel (2005) use family background characteristics ̶ such as the mother's and the father's highest educational grades completed, and a dummy variable for the respondent's living with her parents by age 18 ̶ to identify the motherhood and delayed motherhood effects in the wage regression. Troske and Voicu (2009) use several sources of identification, namely distributional assumptions, non-linearity and the number of a woman's siblings who had children (which is a proxy for "taste for children") as an exclusion restriction. As for the latter, the main idea is that siblings' fertility behavior affects fertility decisions through social interactions occurring in the context of interpersonal networks.…”

Birth spacing, human capital, and the motherhood penalty at midlife in the United States

“…Women who return to the labor market after having a first child and before having a second child accumulate more work experience and tenure, which leads to higher wages over time (Troske and Voicu 2013). It is also likely to reduce the depreciation of human capital women experience from time out of the labor market for childbearing.…”

“…Women who postpone childbearing to later ages have the opportunity to accumulate more human capital in the form of education, work experience, and tenure, leading to higher relative wages (Blackburn, Bloom, and Neumark 1993), greater market productivity (Troske and Voicu 2013), and a potential for higher wage growth. They may also experience less depreciation of human capital than earlier childbearers if depreciation costs decline with increased experience (Miller 2011).…”

“…As such, the effects of birth timing and birth spacing may be confounded in existing estimates of the motherhood penalty. For example, if spacing one's children close together is good for women's labor market outcomes, as Ross (1974) and Mincer and Polachek (1974) have argued in their classic studies, and women who begin bearing children at later ages also tend to space their children close together (Troske and Voicu 2013), the reported financial benefits to postponing a first birth found in previous research will be overstated, since these benefits will derive from the spacing pattern as well as first-birth timing.…”