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Seminar in Economics | Fertility and Family Labor Supply with Hamish Low

Department of Economics welcomes you to a seminar with Hamish Low, University of Oxford, who will present "Fertility and Family Labor Supply". We study the importance of fertility adjustments for labor market responsiveness of men and women using longitudinal Danish register data and tax reforms. We estimate a life-cycle model of family labor supply in which couples choose the timing and number of children, which also replicates the asymmetric fertility adjustments.

Welcome to the Higher Seminar in Economics organised by the Department of Economics, SSE. The seminar speaker is Hamish Low, Professor of Economics at University of Oxford, who will present "Fertility and Family Labor Supply".

Abstract

We study the importance of fertility adjustments for labor market responsiveness of men and women. First, we use longitudinal Danish register data and tax reforms from 2009 to provide new empirical evidence on fertility adjustments to tax changes. We find asymmetric effects between men and women: Increases in marginal net-of tax wages of women decrease fertility whereas increases in marginal net-of-tax wages of men increase fertility. Second, we quantify the importance of these fertility adjustments for understanding labor supply responses to tax reforms. To this end, we estimate a life-cycle model of family labor supply in which couples choose the timing and number of children, which also replicates the asymmetric fertility adjustments. In the model, allowing fertility adjustments increase the labor supply responsiveness of women by 28%, and, as a result, tax reforms can have larger and more persistent effects.

Hamish Low is the James Meade Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Hamish focuses his research on what sort of risk individuals face over their life-times and over the business cycle, and to what extent individuals can insure against these risks.

The seminar takes place at SSE in room Torsten.

Please contact kristen.pendleton@hhs.se if you have any questions.

Dept. of Economics Family economics Public economics Economics Seminar in economics