IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxecpp/v68y2016i1p197-216..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The impact of children on women’s labour supply and earnings in the UK: evidence using twin births

Author

Listed:
  • Mary A. Silles

Abstract

The objective of this article is to investigate the effect of children on women’s labour supply and earnings for the UK. Estimating the causal relationship between family size and economic status is complicated because the same factors that increase family size may also affect the labour market outcomes of women. The birth of twins is used as an instrument to address this problem. Amongst women with children under age 13, the IV estimates indicate that a larger family induced by a twin birth adversely affects women’s labour supply and earnings. Amongst women with older children, the IV results show no evidence of a causal effect, despite significant OLS relationships. Finally, we compare these results to estimates produced using a twins’ sex composition instrument. Estimates using this instrument are very close to the estimates using twin births and imply that the labour market consequences of childbearing disappear over time.

Suggested Citation

  • Mary A. Silles, 2016. "The impact of children on women’s labour supply and earnings in the UK: evidence using twin births," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 68(1), pages 197-216.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:68:y:2016:i:1:p:197-216.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpv055
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gong, Yifan & Stinebrickner, Ralph & Stinebrickner, Todd, 2022. "Marriage, children, and labor supply: Beliefs and outcomes," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 231(1), pages 148-164.
    2. Bhalotra, Sonia & Clarke, Damian, 2022. "Analysis of Twins," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 1428, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    3. Terhi Maczulskij & Petri Böckerman, 2019. "Harsh times: do stressors lead to labor market losses?," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 20(3), pages 357-373, April.
    4. Yusuf Sofiyandi1, 2018. "The Effect of Residential Location and Housing Unit Characteristics on Labor Force Participation of Childbearing Women in Indonesia: Using Twin Births As A Quasi-Natural Experiment," LPEM FEBUI Working Papers 201822, LPEM, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Indonesia, revised Jul 2018.
    5. Aolin Leng & Fuli Kang, 2022. "Impact of two-child policy on female employment and corporate performance: Empirical evidence from Chinese listed companies from 2010 to 2020," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-13, December.
    6. Beatrice Baaba Tawiah, 2023. "The Effect of Children on Health," Working Papers Dissertations 103, Paderborn University, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics.
    7. Semih Tumen & Belgi Turan, 2023. "The effect of fertility on female labor supply in a labor market with extensive informality," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 65(4), pages 1855-1894, October.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:68:y:2016:i:1:p:197-216.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.