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Title: A Dynamic Model of Female Labor Supply And Fertility: The Role of Part-Time Work
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Francesconi, Marco
A Dynamic Model of Female Labor Supply And Fertility: The Role of Part-Time Work
Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 1995
Cohort(s): Young Women
Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning
Keyword(s): Economics of Gender; Fertility; Labor Supply; Life Cycle Research; Modeling; Part-Time Work; Schooling; Women's Studies

This dissertation focuses on one aspect of the interaction between female labor supply and fertility: the role of part- time work for married women over the life cycle. Policy questions that are addressed by this research include: Is high persistence in employment a common feature to both part- timers and full-timers? How would the patterns of women's employment and fertility behavior vary with changes in exogenous variables, such as schooling level, or the shape of the earnings profiles; and Is part-time work a viable strategy for women to keep their "hands in" the labor market while raising children? The decisions to stay at home or work part time/full time and to have a child are modeled as the sequential choice of married women solving a stochastic dynamic programming problem. At each discrete period, the forward-looking individual chooses whether to be employed in a part- time/full-time job and whether to have a child based on expected utility maximization. Allowing for uncertainty, decisions made at each period depend on the random shocks to sector-specific (part- time and full-time) wages and the stochastic realization of individual taste for children. The discrete-choice optimization problem takes place over a finite horizon, defined by the length of the fertile cycle of a couple. The decision-making process continues, with the same alternatives, until the end of the fertile cycle. The model is estimated using data from the young women's cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experience for survey years 1968-1991. The estimation method involves solving a stochastic dynamic programming problem and embedding the solution in a maximum likelihood procedure. The structural parameters of the model that maximize the likelihood function can be found using a numerical optimization algorithm by simulation of thesolution of the dynamic program and of the underlying choice probabilities. Structural estimation permits to perform policy experiments relating to fertility and labor markets. The estimates allow for predictions of the change in number of years worked later on in life that would arise with exogenous changes in the wife's schooling level, age at marriage, earnings profiles and disutility of work. Effects of such policies on the number of children ever born over the fertile cycle of wives are also obtained. Finally, the quantitative effect of work interruption and opportunity cost of children in terms of lifetime earnings are evaluated.
Bibliography Citation
Francesconi, Marco. A Dynamic Model of Female Labor Supply And Fertility: The Role of Part-Time Work. Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 1995.