Why are Fertility and Female Participation Rates Positively Correlated across OECD countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to understand recent observations of fertility, female employment, and participation rates in O.E.C.D. countries. These observations indicate that fertility rates are positively correlated with female employment ratios and participation rates across O.E.C.D. countries during the period 1985-1996. Moreover, the time series observations show that fertility rates are procyclical in developed countries. Economic theories of fertility developed after the seminal work of Mincer (1962) and Becker (1965) are consistent with secular trends of fertility and female employment but do not account for these recent observations. In this paper we explore the role of labor market frictions in understanding the positive association between fertility and employment among O.E.C.D. countries. To this end we develop a framework of fertility and labor market participation decisions which is designed to quantitatively study the impact of labor market frictions on the timing of births, the fertility rate, and the labor market participation of females. We find that unemployment induces females to postpone and space births which, in turn, reduces the total fertility rate. In our framework, economies with a high unemployment rate are characterized by a low fertility rate, female participation, and female employment ratio. We also find that in our framework, differences in unemployment rates similar to the ones observed among O.E.C.D. countries, can generate a positive correlation between fertility and labor market participation rates. Interestingly, a temporary shock that increases job destruction can generate a decrease of the fertility rate and of the female employment ratio that mimics time series observations of Sweden during the 90's.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".