We estimate the effect of family size on various measures of labor market outcomes over the whole career until retirement, using instrumental variables estimation in data from Norwegian administrative registers. Parents’ number of children is instrumented with the sex mix of their first two children. We find that having additional children causes sizable reductions in labor supply for women, which fade as children mature and even turn positive for women without a college degree. Among women with a college degree, there is evidence of persistent and even increasing career penalties of family size. Having additional children reduces these women’s probability of being employed by higher-paying firms, their earnings rank within the employing firm, and their probability of being the top earner at the workplace. Some of the career effects persist long after labor supply is restored. We find no effect of family size on any of men’s labor market outcomes in either the short or long run.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s13524-017-0612-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Empirical research consistently finds that people with high education have more liberal immigration attitudes. To what extent this relationship reflects a causal effect of education is, however, largely unknown. We rely on the staggered introduction of a major Norwegian education reform to get exogenous variation in respondents' level of education. The reform lifted the bottom of the education distribution by increasing the compulsory years of education by two years. We find no significant differences in immigration attitudes between those who were educated in the old and the new education system. Our results suggest that if education has a causal effect on immigration attitudes, it is likely to operate on other education margins. * We would like to thank seminar participants at the Institute for Social Research, Frisch Center for Economic Research, and University of Bergen for comments on a previous draft of the paper. Funding from the Research Council of Norway is acknowledged (grant no. 270687).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.