While fertility is positively correlated across generations, the causal effect of children's experience with larger sibships on their own fertility in adulthood is poorly understood. Using the sex composition of the two first-born children as an instrumental variable, we estimate the effect of...

Fertility contagion through social networks increasingly attracts the interest of demographers. While these theories propose a causal mechanism, they are rarely put to test in a plausibly causal statistical design. This study applies quasi-experimental techniques to distinguish network effects...

The interpretation of instrumental variables (IV) estimates as local average treatment effects (LATE) of instrument-induced shifts in treatment raises concerns about their external validity and policy relevance. We examine how to move beyond LATE in situations where the instrument is discrete,...

Women make up almost 50 percent of the employed population in Norway, but only about 25 percent of the entrepreneurs. Using registry data on the whole population we address gender differences in the propensity to become an entrepreneur. We do so by analysing transition from ordinary wage...

We study the impact of child care for toddlers on the labor supply of mothers and fathers in Norway. For identification, we exploit the staggered expansion across municipalities following a large reform from 2002. Our IV-estimates indicate that child care use causes an increase in the labor...

Norwegian parents of preschool children base their care choices on a completely different choice set from their predecessor. Now there is essentially only one type of nonparental care – center-based care – and on the parental side fathers take a more pivotal role in early childhood care. In...

Women's empowerment is increasingly put forth as a mean to promote child development. However, little empirical research has evaluated the pathways of women empowerment leading to it. This paper uses a household survey conducted in Karnataka, South India to explore the impact of female status on...

A methodology to describe the distributional and behavioural effects of child care subsidies is presented within a micro simulation framework. We discuss the effects of changing the governmental policy to support families with preschool children, from today's subsidisation of spaces at child...

This paper analyzes the (re)entry of Norwegian mothers into full-time and part-time employment following the first and second birth. Based on theories of job search and human capital depreciation and appreciation a semi-parametric hazard model is estimated, expressing the entry rate as a...

This paper compares the employment patterns of women after first and second birth in Finland, Norway and Sweden during 1972-92, focusing on the impact of parental leave and childcare programs on the transitions to full-time and part-time work. The results unanimously point to the great...