FERTILITY AND MOTHERS’ LABOUR FORCE PARTICIPATION IN RURAL INDIA

Isha Gupta ()
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Isha Gupta: Department of Economics and Management “Marco Fanno” University of Padova, Italy

No 267, "Marco Fanno" Working Papers from Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche "Marco Fanno"

Abstract: This paper estimates the causal effect of having young children aged 0 to 5 years on mothers’ labour force participation in rural India. In order to address the potential endogeneity in the fertility decision, I exploit Indian families’ preference for having sons. I leverage exogenous variation in the gender of older children aged 6+ years as an instrumental variable for having younger children aged 0 to 5 years in the family. IV estimates show that the mothers’ participation is significantly reduced by 9.9% due to the presence of young children aged 0 to 5 years in the household, with the negative effect mostly driven by mothers belonging to the highest income quartile; mothers with high education; and mothers residing in nuclear families.

Keywords: Female labour force participation; Fertility; Instrumental variable; Local average treatment effect (LATE); India; Compliers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C26 J13 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2020-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dev and nep-lab
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pad:wpaper:0267

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