A 'Natural Experiment' on the Economics of Storks: Evidence on the Impact of Differential Family Policy on Fertility Rates in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From the mid 1980's, the Canadian government froze or cut back the major traditional provisions targeted towards families with children. Faced with the lowest (and declining) fertility rate in Canada, the government of the province of Québec (where the population is mostly French) decided in 1986 to implement incrementally a variety of generous benefits (young children and new-born universal allowances contingent on birth rank, tax credits for dependent children, and family income tax reduction) to reverse the trend. In 1998, this policy was changed for a benefit targeted on family income to finance highly subsidized childcare services in the public sector. The 1986-1997 window offers a 'natural experiment' to evaluate the effects of generous tax and transfer policies on fertility. The paper uses the important change in family policy that occurred in only one province out of ten in Canada to identify the its treatment effects. Different data sets and a variety of methodological approaches are used in the analysis. First, the Vital Statistics by birth order (number of births per year as well as the number of women per age), from 1981 to 1997 for Québec and the Rest of Canada (ROC), permit the application of the Bongaarts-Feeney formula that accounts for the impact of changes in the quantum and tempo of fertility by birth order. Second, the preceding data are combined with a series of yearly repeated cross-sectional data sets to compute aggregate fertility transition rates for parities 1, 2 and 3 (women who are at risk of giving birth to a child each parity). A difference-in-differences estimator is calculated to identify the impact of the 1986-1996 'natural experiment'. Estimates are also computed using standard linear regression methods that control for other aggregate effects that could explain differences in fertility rates between Québec and the ROC. The results show that generous family benefits do have an effect on fertility transition rates. However, we cannot determine whether the benefits simply accelerated the decisions about having children while having no effects on the desired number of children. À partir de 1986, le gouvernement du Québec a mis graduellement en place une série de mesures de soutien financier en faveur des familles (allocations universelles jeunes enfants et de naissance modulées selon le rang de naissances, crédit d'impôt et réduction d'impôt famille) afin de renverser la baisse importante de la fécondité. Durant la même période, le gouvernement fédéral réduisait son soutien financier à l'égard des familles. Ce changement de politique familiale provinciale unique au Québec offre une "expérience naturelle" permettant de mesurer l'effet des transferts et de la fiscalité sur la fécondité. Plusieurs types de données et de méthodes d'analyse sont utilisées pour identifier "l'effet traitement" de la politique au Québec. D'abord, les naissances selon le rang, l'année et l'âge de la mère pour le Québec et le Reste du Canada (RdC), permettent de distinguer, à l'aide de la formule proposée par Bongaarts-Feeney, l'effet de tempo de l'effet de quantum qui peuvent être associées aux changements de fécondité. Puis, les données précédentes sont combinées avec celles provenant d'une série de coupes transversales permettant de calculer des taux agrégés de transition entre différents rang de naissances (les femmes à risque de donner naissance à des enfants de rang 1, 2 et 3). Un estimateur de différence en différences est calculé pour identifier l'effet traitement de la politique. Puis, l'effet de la politique est estimé économétriquement en contrôlant les autres effets agrégés qui peuvant influencer les différences de fécondité entre le Québec et le RdC. Les résultats indiquent le soutien financier généreux à l'égard des enfants a augmenté la fécondité. Cependant, l'analyse ne permet pas de dire si l'aide financières a simplement accéléré la décision d'avoir des enfants tout en n'ayant aucun effet sur le nombre désiré d'enfants.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".