The effect of fertility on mothers' labor supply over the last two centuries

Arbeitspapier

This paper documents the evolving impact of childbearing on the work activity of mothers. Based on a compiled dataset of 441 censuses and surveys between 1787 and 2015, representing 103 countries and 48.4 million mothers, we document three main findings: (1) the effect of fertility on labor supply is small and typically indistinguishable from zero at low levels of development and economically large and negative at higher levels of development; (2) this negative gradient is remarkably consistent across histories of currently developed countries and contemporary cross-sections of countries; and (3) the results are strikingly robust to identification strategies, model specification, data construction, and rescaling. We explain our results within a standard labor-leisure model and attribute the negative labor supply gradient to changes in the sectoral and occupational structure of female jobs as countries develop.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Working Paper ; No. 2017-14

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Aaronson, Daniel ; Dehejia, Rajeev H. ; Jordan, Andrew ; Pop-Eleches, Christian ; Samii, Cyrus ; Schulze, Karl
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
• (where): Chicago, IL
• (when): 2017

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/200570
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET