Working Paper: NBER ID: w15074
Authors: Qingyan Shang; Bruce A. Weinberg
Abstract: Observers have argued about whether highly-educated women are opting out of their careers and for families. If so, it is natural to expect fertility to increase and, insofar as children are associated with lower employment, further declines in employment. This paper provides a comprehensive study of recent trends in the fertility of college-graduate women. We study fertility at a range of ages; consider both the intensive and extensive margins, explore a range of data sets; and study the period from 1940 to 2006. In contrast to most existing work, we find that college graduate women are indeed opting for families. Fertility increases at almost all ages along both the intensive and extensive margins since the late 1990s or 2000 and this recent increase in fertility is consistent across datasets.
Keywords: fertility; highly educated women; labor market participation
JEL Codes: J13; J16; J22
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Highly educated women opting for families (J12) | increase in fertility rates (J13) |
| Increase in plural births among older women (J19) | rise in fertility treatments (J13) |
| Increase in childbearing among women with strong labor market attachment (J49) | decrease in difference in employment between women with and without children (J79) |
| increase in fertility rates (J13) | reduction in employment (J63) |