Fertility, Economic Incentives and Individual Heterogeneity: Register Data-Based Evidence from France and Germany
利用法国和德国的大型行政面板数据，研究发现考虑个体异质性后，职业和教育对生育决策的影响与横截面方法结果不同；机会成本越高生育率越低，但德国生育决策更依赖个人条件，法国因公共托育支持而家庭与职业更兼容。
Abstract This study demonstrates the importance of accounting for correlated unobserved heterogeneity to correctly identify the relevance of career and education for fertility decisions. By exploiting individual-level life-cycle information on fertility, career and education from large administrative longitudinal datasets, this paper shows that non-linear panel models produce substantially different results than the cross-sectional approaches widely used in previous studies. Higher opportunity costs of having children are found to be associated with lower fertility within a country, while the magnitude of the adjustment differs strongly across countries. In Germany, fertility decisions are found to depend more on individual circumstances than in France, where better public childcare support enhances the compatibility between family and professional life.