Marta Cardoso Lopes

Marta Cardoso Lopes - Website

Research interests

Primary: Labour Economics, Applied Microeconomics
Secondary: Family Economics, Computational Economics

Paper Title - 'Job Security and Fertility Decisions'

Abstract - As temporary employment is highly predominant among young women, job security should be taken into consideration when fertility choices are made. In this paper I present reduced-form evidence that women working on fixed-term contracts delay maternity, especially for the first birth. Through a policy reform in Portugal in 2003, I show that the negative effect of job insecurity might be attenuated by the contract duration. To identify the different channels of these results, I build and estimate a dynamic life-cycle structural model where women decide both labour supply and fertility, conditional on the characteristics of the job contract.

Fixed-term contracts have limited duration and a maximum number of renewals while permanent contracts have no expiring date, but higher firing costs associated. Simulating different labour market scenarios, I find that increasing the conversion rate of fixed-term to permanent contracts can provide a positive effect on fertility choices. The result is mainly driven by the decrease in the number of childless women corroborating the reduced-form evidence for the first birth decision. In fact, when I simulate contract specific tax rates the outcome is a compositional change among the number of children in the household, indicating income as relatively more important for the second birth decision.

References

Pedro Portugal (Nova SBE and Bank of Portugal)
Pedro Carneiro (UCL)
Lars Nesheim (UCL)
Aureo de Paula (UCL)