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Suffer the Little Children: Measuring the Effects of Parenthood on Well-Being Worldwide

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Author Info
Luca Stanca ()

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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.

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File URL: http://dipeco.economia.unimib.it/repec/pdf/mibwpaper173.pdf
File Format: application/pdf
File Function: First version, 2009
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Publisher Info
Paper provided by University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number 173.

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Length: 25 pages
Date of creation: Oct 2009
Date of revision: Oct 2009
Handle: RePEc:mib:wpaper:173

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Related research
Keywords: well-being; fertility; children; decision-making;

Find related papers by JEL classification:
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

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This page was last updated on 2009-11-9.


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