A Natural Experiment on Job Insecurity and Fertility in France
The Review of Economics and Statistics
2022
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 (2)
- Pages
- 386-398
- Language
- en
- Export
- BibTeX
- Sources
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