IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crm/wpaper/25134.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Fertility, Marriage, and Gender Equality Quandary

Author

Listed:
  • Anson Zhou

Abstract

This paper studies the nexus among fertility, family structure, and gender income equality. I document a novel three-way trade-off in cross-country data: simultaneously achieving high fertility, low single parenthood, and gender income equality is unlikely at all levels of economic development. To explain this fact, I develop a unified theory where the trade-off emerges as an equilibrium outcome. Among various policy instruments, I show that reducing women's child-rearing costs stands out as the unique one that mitigates the trade-off, but the policy costs grow as wages increase. When I calibrate the model to fit Mexico's experience from 1990 to 2015, I find that gender-neutral technological progress explains half of rising single parenthood and declining fertility, while gender-biased productivity growth and the gender education gap reversal account for the narrowing gender income and welfare gaps.

Suggested Citation

  • Anson Zhou, 2025. "The Fertility, Marriage, and Gender Equality Quandary," RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series 25134, ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin).
    • Handle: RePEc:crm:wpaper:25134
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.rfberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/25134.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D13 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Production and Intrahouse Allocation
    • J11 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Demographic Trends, Macroeconomic Effects, and Forecasts
    • J12 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure
    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:crm:wpaper:25134. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Moritz Lubczyk or Matthew Nibloe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cmucluk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.