We develop a tractable framework with a fully specified dynamic process of demographic and labor decisions over an individual female's life span to determine the timing of childbearing. Fertility affects women's behavior through three channels: its tradeoff with leisure, its interactions with human capital investment, and its cost in terms of lost market productivity. Instead of numerically solving a discrete-time version of the model, we propose an alternative solution technique that provides analytic, closed-form solutions for the continuous-time dynamic optimization problem with (discrete) time-line variables. The analytic results indicate that (i) increased impatience has an ambiguous effect on childbearing timing; (ii) the age at first birth rises at an increasing rate with the productivity loss from children; and (iii) women of greater ability have births at later ages and are more sensitive to parameter changes. Calibration exercises suggest that focusing on the median female's response to changes in the preference, cost, and technology parameters fails to capture their important distributional effects.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
9231.
Length: Date of creation: Sep 2002 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9231
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Find related papers by JEL classification: J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
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