We show that in the US, the UK, Italy and Sweden women whose first child is a boy are less likely to work in a typical week and work fewer hours than women with first-born girls. The puzzle is why women in these countries react in this way to the sex of their first child, which is chosen...

Women whose first child is a boy work less than women with first-born girls. After a first-born boy the probability that women have more children increases. Higher fertility is a possible explanation for the lower labor supply of mothers.

Among Mexican parents child gender has an effect on family structure and fertility decisions. A first-born daughter increases the probability of father absence, of maternal custody in case of marital dissolution, of having more children and of a shorter elapsed period before a new child is born....

The dynamics of multiple time use in paid work and in household activities with housework, child rearing and DIY of married women are analyzed with a two step procedure: the estimation of the participation decision in intertemporal labor force participation strategies (entering, leaving the...

This paper contributes to the discussion on the effects of the number of children on female employment in Europe. Previous research has usually either (1) compared these effects across countries assuming exogeneity of family size or (2) used methods which deal with endogeneity of family size but...

We estimate a structural life-cycle model of fertility and female labour supply and use it to evaluate the effects of a number of key family policy measures based on data for Germany. Parental leave benefits, child benefits and subsidized childcare are found to have substantial fertility...

Based on a structural model of fertility and female labour force supply with unobserved heterogeneity and state dependence, we evaluate the 2007 reform of parental leave benefits in Germany, which replaced a flat, means-tested benefit by a generous earnings-related transfer. The model predicts a...

This paper summarises new evidence from two Treasury working papers on the responsiveness of female labour supply to child care costs, availability, and quality. In one study, we drew on lessons from the literature and new detailed data to provide new estimates of the labour supply elasticity...

This paper examines the time profile of the effect of fertility on female labour earnings with respect to time since birth. To address endogeneity of fertility to labour income, we use the same-sex instrument (Angrist and Evans, 1998) in a novel way on a panel data set to uncover the time...

The “natural experiments” related to human reproduction are an increasingly often applied strategy for assessment of the family size effects on female employment. The aim of this paper is to review theoretical concepts and the available empirical evidence on studies that implement this...