An Empirical Analysis of Life Cycle Fertility and Female Labor Supply
Abstract
This paper examines household fertility and female labor supply over the life cycle. We investigate how maternal time inputs, market expenditures on offspring, as well as the benefits they yield their parents, vary with ages of offspring, and influence female labor supply and contraceptive behavior. Our econometric framework combines a female labor supply model and a contraceptive choice index function. It also accounts for the fact that conceptions are not perfectly controllable events. Using longitudinal data on married couples from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate these equations and test alternative specifications of the technologies governing child care. Our findings suggest that while parents cannot perfectly control conceptions, variations in child care costs do affect the life cycle spacing of births. Furthermore, our results demonstrate the gains of modeling the linkages between female labor supply and fertility behavior at the household level.
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Scholars@Duke
V. Joseph Hotz
Professor Hotz specializes in the subjects of applied econometrics, labor economics, economic demography, and economics of the family. His studies have investigated the impacts of social programs, such as welfare-to-work training; the relationship between childbearing patterns and labor force participation of U.S. women; the effects of teenage pregnancy; the child care market; the Earned Income Tax Credit; and other such subjects. He began conducting his studies in 1977, and has since published his work extensively in books and leading academic journals. Many of his projects have been funded by grants awarded by the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation. He is currently completing a project with Duncan Thomas on, “Preference and Economic Decision-Making” under a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. His recent works also include, “Tax Policy and Low-Wage Labor Markets: New Work on Employment, Effectiveness and Administration” with John Karl Scholz and Charles Mullin; and “Designing New Models to Explain Family Change and Variation” with S. Philip Morgan. Along with his duties as an independent researcher, Professor Hotz has also held positions as a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the National Poverty Center, the Institute for the Study of Labor, and the Institute for Research on Poverty. He is presently a member of the Committee on National Statistics for the National Academy of Sciences’ Research Council.
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