Volume 41 - Article 45 | Pages 1277–1288
Is a positive association between female employment and fertility still spurious in developed countries?
Date received: | 06 Jun 2019 |
Date published: | 21 Nov 2019 |
Word count: | 2213 |
Keywords: | female labor force participation, fixed effects, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), total fertility rate (TFR) |
DOI: | 10.4054/DemRes.2019.41.45 |
Abstract
Background: The cross-sectional association between female employment and fertility across developed countries turned from negative to positive during the mid-1980s. The conventional view is that the observed positive association is spurious owing to country-specific heterogeneity.
Objective: We revisit the validity of this view using recent data up to 2017 from 24 countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Methods: Based on the data downloaded from the OECD database, we estimate the time-series association between the female labor force participation rate (FLFP) and total fertility rate (TFR) by fixed-effects regression models, which can control for country-specific heterogeneity.
Results: The more recent the data set used, the more likely it is that the time-series correlation will be positive between FLFP and TFR, even after controlling for country-specific heterogeneity. We also observe that public spending on families, especially in the form of benefits in kind, starts increasing once FLFP becomes sufficiently high.
Conclusions: A positive correlation between female employment and fertility in developed countries is no longer attributable to country-specific heterogeneity. The results are supportive of the view that higher female employment can make socioinstitutional contexts more favorable for childbearing, leading to a positive association between FLFP and TFR.
Contribution: This study underscored the need for further investigation of the association between female employment and fertility, which is likely to have changed in recent decades.
Author's Affiliation
Takashi Oshio - Hitotsubashi University, Japan
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