The Impact of Fertility on Mothers' Labour Supply in Australia: Evidence from Exogenous Variation in Family Size

Abstract

This paper estimates the impact of fertility on mothers' labour supply in Australia, using exogenous variation in family size generated by twin births and the gender mix of siblings. Results show that having more than one child decreases mothers' labour market participation by 12 percentage points and hours worked by around four hours per week. Having more than two children reduces labour market participation by 12 percentage points and hours worked by three hours a week. Compared with other countries, the effects for Australia are large. †I thank Deborah , the labour market participation (LMP) rate of 15-to 64-year-old women rose from 45 per cent in 1970 to 70 per cent in 2009, whereas men's LMP rate decreased from 91 per cent to 83 per cent during the same time period (OECD).

Welfare Entry and Exit after Marital Separation among Australian Mothers

“…Personal circumstance refers to characteristics of the individual herself that might interfere with exiting welfare or finding employment. Although some personal characteristics are considered to be beyond the individual's control, such as domestic violence (Riger et al ., ), physical and mental health problems of the mother or her child (Romero et al ., ; Nadel et al ., ; Zhu, ), and ethnicity (Barrett, ; Bradbury & Chalmers, ), other characteristics have greater agency associated with them such as substance abuse (Metsch & Pollack, ), number of children (Moschion, ; Özcan & Breen, ; Zhu, ), past human capital accumulation (Becker, ) and history of welfare receipt (Blank, ).…”

The effect of fertility on female labor supply in a labor market with extensive informality

“…1 For other country-or region-specific studies, see Moschion (2013) for Australia, Cruces and Galiani (2007) for Latin America, de Jong et al (2017) for Sub-Saharan Africa, and Majbouri (2019) for Iran.…”

The casual effect of fertility: The multiple problems with instrumental variables for the number of children in families

“…and Angrist and Pischke (2009, pp. 160-161) followedAngrist and Evans (1998) in interpreting the estimated effect as a LATE, it has been adopted by some other studies(Cáceres- Delpiano 2006, 2012aÅslund and Grönqvist 2010;Cáceres-Delpiano and Simonsen 2012;Moschion 2013;Baranowska-Rataj and Matysiak 2016;Braakmann and Wildman 2016;Silles 2016Silles , 2019Brinch et al 2017;Cools and Hart 2017;Fontaine 2018;Gabel et al 2018;Guo et al 2018;Ajefu 2019;Bhalotra and Clarke 2019;Diaz and Fiel 2020;Priebe 2020;Aaronson et al 2021). The other (two-…”