A Natural Experiment on Job Insecurity and Fertility in France

Abstract

Job insecurity can have wide-ranging consequences outside of the labour market. We here argue that it reduces fertility amongst the employed. The 1999 rise in the French Delalande tax, paid by large private firms when they laid off workers aged over 50, produced an exogenous rise in job insecurity for younger workers in these firms. A difference-in-differences analysis of French ECHP data reveals that this greater job insecurity for these under-50s significantly reduced their probability of having a new child by 3.9 percentage points. Reduced fertility is only found at the intensive margin: job insecurity reduces family size but not the probability of parenthood itself. Our results also suggest negative selection into parenthood, as this fertility effect does not appear for low-income and less-educated workers.

Economic insecurity, racial anxiety, and right‐wing populism

“…It has been argued that economic dislocation has triggered a populist reaction among the losers of globalization, whose resentment and anger against the elite have favored right-wing parties due to their protectionist and nationalistic claims (Guiso et al, 2017;Guiso et al, 2020;Rodrik, 2021). 1 Defined as the anxiety produced by a lack of economic safety, i.e., by an inability to obtain protection against subjectively significant potential economic losses (Osberg, 1998;Osberg and Sharpe, 2014), EI has implications for many aspects of individual well-being (Osberg and Sharpe, 2009;Smith et al, 2009;Rohde et al, 2016;Reichert and Tauchmann, 2017;Watson and Osberg, 2017;Watson, 2018;Clark and Lepinteur, 2020), and political attitudes (Mughan and Lacy, 2002;Hacker et al, 2013). As a multidimensional concept (Cantó et al, 2020;Romaguera-de-la Cruz, 2020), different facets of EI are often used to generate a comprehensive definition of the phenomenon (Bossert and D'Ambrosio, 2016;Rohde and Tang, 2018).…”