Fertility and financial incentives in France

The increase in births in France since 1995 has often been linked by commentators to more generous family benefits. We study here empirically the link between fertility and financial incentives by estimating and simulating a joint structural model of participation and fertility on a sample of French women. The results reported here, while preliminary, suggest that fertility responds to incentives in a non-negligible way. However, they also have some puzzling features: financial incentives appear to have much stronger effects on low-parity births.