IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ess/wpaper/id2754.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Fertility, Female Labor Supply and Public Policy

Author

Listed:
  • Patricia Apps
  • Ray Rees

Abstract

Historically, in virtually all developed economies there seems to be clear evidence of an inverse relationship between female labor supply and fertility. However, particularly in the last decade or so, the relationship across countries has been positive: for example countries like Germany, Italy and Spain with the lowest fertility rates also have the lowest female participation rates. They have accepted the hypothesis that the reason for this lies in the combined effects of a country’s tax system and system of child support, and we have sought to clarify this theoretically, using an extended version of the Galor-Weil model. The results suggest that countries with individual rather than joint taxation, and which support families through improved availability of alternatives to domestic child care, rather than through direct child payments, are likely to have both higher female labor supply and higher fertility. These results are strengthened when we take account of the heterogeneity among households that undoubtedly exists. [IZA Discussion Paper No. 409]

Suggested Citation

  • Patricia Apps & Ray Rees, 2010. "Fertility, Female Labor Supply and Public Policy," Working Papers id:2754, eSocialSciences.
  • Handle: RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:2754
    Note: Institutional Papers
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.esocialsciences.org/Download/repecDownload.aspx?fname=Document11082010400.2713739.pdf&fcategory=Articles&AId=2754&fref=repec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Alessandro Balestrino & Alessandro Cigno & Anna Pettini, 2002. "Endogenous Fertility and the Design of Family Taxation," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 9(2), pages 175-193, March.
    2. Cigno, Alessandro & Pettini, Anna, 2002. "Taxing family size and subsidizing child-specific commodities?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 84(1), pages 75-90, April.
    3. Galor, Oded & Weil, David N, 1996. "The Gender Gap, Fertility, and Growth," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 86(3), pages 374-387, June.
    4. Alessandro Cigno, 2001. "Comparative Advantage, Observability, and the Optimal Tax Treatment of Families with Children," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 8(4), pages 455-470, August.
    5. Robert Fenge & Wolfgang Ochel, 2001. "Die Vereinbarkeit von Familie und Beruf: der Schlüssel für eine kinderreiche Gesellschaft," ifo Schnelldienst, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, vol. 54(12), pages 17-29, November.
    6. Blau Francine D & Kahn Lawrence M, 2007. "The Gender Pay Gap," The Economists' Voice, De Gruyter, vol. 4(4), pages 1-6, June.
    7. Cigno, Alessandro, 1986. "Fertility and the Tax-Benefit System: A Reconsideration of the Theory of Family Taxation," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 96(384), pages 1035-1051, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Volker Meier & Matthias Wrede, 2013. "Reducing the excess burden of subsidizing the stork: joint taxation, individual taxation, and family tax splitting," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 26(3), pages 1195-1207, July.
    2. Thomas Baudin, 2011. "Family Policies: What Does the Standard Endogenous Fertility Model Tell Us?," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 13(4), pages 555-593, August.
    3. Blumkin, Tomer & Margalioth, Yoram & Sadka, Efraim, 2010. "Taxing Children: The Re-distributive Role of Child Benefits - Revisited," Foerder Institute for Economic Research Working Papers 275758, Tel-Aviv University > Foerder Institute for Economic Research.
    4. Tomer Blumkin & Yoram Margalioth & Efraim Sadka, 2015. "The Re-distributive Role of Child Benefits Revisited," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 22(3), pages 476-501, June.
    5. Alessandro Cigno, 2001. "Comparative Advantage, Observability, and the Optimal Tax Treatment of Families with Children," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 8(4), pages 455-470, August.
    6. Tomer Blumkin & Yoram Margalioth & Efraim Sadka, 2010. "Taxing Children: The Re-distributive Role of Child Benefits - Revisited," CESifo Working Paper Series 2970, CESifo.
    7. Takuya Obara & Yoshitomo Ogawa, 2020. "Optimal Taxation in an Endogenous Fertility Model with Non-Cooperative Couples," Discussion Paper Series 211, School of Economics, Kwansei Gakuin University, revised Jan 2021.
    8. Thomas I. Renström & Luca Spataro, 2021. "Optimal taxation in an endogenous growth model with variable population and public expenditure," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 23(4), pages 639-659, August.
    9. Alessandro Balestrino & Alessandro Cigno & Anna Pettini, 2002. "Endogenous Fertility and the Design of Family Taxation," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 9(2), pages 175-193, March.
    10. Chen, Hung-Ju, 2013. "Child Allowances, Educational Subsidies and Economic Growth," MPRA Paper 51279, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    11. Marie-Louise Leroux & Pierre Pestieau & Gregory Ponthiere, 2022. "Childlessness, childfreeness and compensation," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 59(1), pages 1-35, July.
    12. Helmuth Cremer & Jean-Marie Lozachmeur & Pierre Pestieau, 2012. "Income taxation of couples and the tax unit choice," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 25(2), pages 763-778, January.
    13. Rodrigo R. Soares, 2005. "Mortality Reductions, Educational Attainment, and Fertility Choice," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(3), pages 580-601, June.
    14. Hippolyte d'Albis & Angela Luci Greulich & Grégory Ponthière, 2015. "Avoir un enfant plus tard: Enjeux sociodémographiques du report des naissances," Post-Print halshs-01245523, HAL.
    15. Pierre Pestieau & Gregory Ponthiere, 2013. "Childbearing Age, Family Allowances, and Social Security," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 80(2), pages 385-413, October.
    16. Cigno, Alessandro & Luporini, Annalisa & Pettini, Anna, 2003. "Transfers to families with children as a principal-agent problem," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 87(5-6), pages 1165-1177, May.
    17. Hippolyte D'Albis & Angela Greulich & Grégory Ponthière, 2015. "AVOIR UN ENFANT PLUS TARD Enjeux sociodémographiques du report des naissances," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) hal-01298929, HAL.
    18. Kalemli-Ozcan, Sebnem, 2003. "A stochastic model of mortality, fertility, and human capital investment," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(1), pages 103-118, February.
    19. Luciano Fanti & Luca Gori, 2013. "Fertility-related pensions and cyclical instability," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 26(3), pages 1209-1232, July.
    20. Akira Yakita, 2017. "Fertility, Child Care Outside the Home and Pay-as-You-Go Social Security," Population Economics, in: Population Aging, Fertility and Social Security, chapter 0, pages 45-63, Springer.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Fertility; taxation; labor supply;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H31 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Household
    • H53 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Welfare Programs
    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:ess:wpaper:id:2754. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Padma Prakash (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.esocialsciences.org .

    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.