The Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 104 No. 2 2022
A Natural Experiment on Job Insecurity and Fertility in France
Abstract
Job insecurity can have wide-ranging consequences outside of the labor market. A 1999 rise in the French layoff tax paid by large private firms when they laid off older workers made younger workers less secure; this insecurity reduced their fertility by 3.7 percentage points (with a 95% confidence interval between 0.7 and 6.6 percentage points). Reduced fertility is found only at the intensive margin: job insecurity reduces family size but not the probability of parenthood itself. Our results also suggest negative selection into parenthood, as this fertility effect does not appear for low-income and less-educated workers.
- DOI
- 10.1162/rest_a_00964
- Volume
- 104
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 386-398
- Language
- en
- Sources
- openalex crossref