Cristia, Julian P. 2008. “The Effect of a First Child on Female Labor Supply: Evidence from Women Seeking Fertility Services.” Journal of Human Resources 43(3): 487–510.
Estimating the causal effect of a first child on female labor supply is complicated by the endogeneity of fertility. This paper addresses this problem by focusing on a sample of women from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) who sought help to become pregnant. After a certain period, only some of these women gave birth. Results using this strategy show that having a first child younger than one year old reduces female employment by 26 percentage points. These estimates are close to OLS estimates from census data and to those from OLS and fixed-effects models on NSFG data.
Julian Cristia is a research fellow at the Office of Evaluation and Oversight of the Inter-American Development Bank. The author wishes to thank Julio Caceres Delpiano, Mark Duggan, Eugenio Giolito, Amy Harris, Sandra Hofferth, Arlene Holen, Beomsoo Kim, Noah Meyerson, Reed Olsen, Caroline Polk, Seth Sanders, Jonathan Schwabish, Michael Simpson, John Skeen, Julie Topoleski, two referees, and seminar participants at University of Maryland, Congressional Budget Office and the 2007 Population Association of America Meetings for invaluable comments and suggestions. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning January 2009 through December 2012 from Julian Cristia, 1350 New York Avenue, N.W., Stop B760, Washington, D.C. 20577, e-mail: jcristia@iadb.org. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author only and are not necessarily the views of the Inter-American Development Bank, its board of directors, nor the countries they represent.