Suffer the Little Children: Measuring the Effects of Parenthood on Well-Being Worldwide
Abstract
This paper tests the rational-choice approach to fertility decisions by investigating the relationship between parenthood and well-being in a large sample of individuals from 94 countries. We find that world- wide, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, having children has a negative effect on well-being. Conditioning on age, gender, marital status and education can only partially help to interpret this finding. We show that the negative effect of parent- hood on well-being is explained by a large adverse impact on financial satisfaction, that on average dominates the positive impact on non- financial satisfaction. The results are robust to alternative empirical specifications and to the inclusion of the reported ideal number of children as a proxy variable to address the endogeneity of parenthood decisions.Download Info
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Paper provided by University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number 173.Length: 25 pages
Date of creation: Oct 2009
Date of revision: Oct 2009
Handle: RePEc:mib:wpaper:173
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Keywords: well-being; fertility; children; decision-making;Other versions of this item:
- Stanca, Luca, 2012. "Suffer the little children: Measuring the effects of parenthood on well-being worldwide," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 81(3), pages 742-750.
- A13 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Social Values
- D10 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - General
- D61 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Allocative Efficiency; Cost-Benefit Analysis
- I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare and Poverty - - - General Welfare
- J17 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Value of Life; Foregone Income
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2009-11-07 (All new papers)
- NEP-HAP-2009-11-07 (Economics of Happiness)
- NEP-LTV-2009-11-07 (Unemployment, Inequality & Poverty)
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Citations
Blog mentions
As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:- Children & happiness
by chris dillow in Stumbling and Mumbling on 2009-11-09 14:34:58
Cited by:
- Anna Baranowska & Anna Matysiak, 2011.
"Does parenthood increase happiness? Evidence for Poland,"
Vienna Yearbook of Population Research,
Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, vol. 9(1), pages 307-325.
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