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American Economic Review Vol. 101 No. 4 2011

Fertility and the Personal Exemption: Comment

Richard K. Crump1; Gopi Shah Goda2; Kevin J. Mumford3

1 Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 33 Liberty Street, New York, NY 10045. · 2 Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Stanford University, 366 Galvez Street, Stanford, CA 94305. · 3 Department of Economics, Purdue University, 100 S. Grant St., West Lafayette, IN 47907.

Abstract

One of the most commonly cited studies on the effect of child subsidies on fertility, Whittington, Alm, and Peters (1990), claimed a large positive effect of child tax benefits on fertility using time series methods. We revisit this question in light of recent increases in child tax benefits by replicating this earlier study and extending the analysis. We do not find strong evidence to justify the model specification from the original paper. Moreover, even if the original specification is appropriate, we show that the results are not robust to more general measures of child tax benefits.

DOI
10.1257/aer.101.4.1616
Volume
101
Issue
4
Pages
1616-1628
Language
en
Sources
openalex bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref

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