Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-2lccl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T21:43:03.536Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Immigrant supply of marketable child care and native fertility in Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2021

R. D. Mariani  and
F. C. Rosati Open the ORCID record for F. C. Rosati [Opens in a new window]
R. D. Mariani
Affiliation:
University of Rome “Tor Vergata” and Centre for Economic and International Studies (CEIS), Rome, Italy
F. C. Rosati*
Affiliation:
University of Rome “Tor Vergata” and Centre for Economic and International Studies (CEIS), Rome, Italy
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: f.rosati@economia.uniroma2.it
Get access

Abstract

The availability of child-care services has often been advocated as one of the instruments to counter the fertility decline observed in many high-income countries. In the recent past, large inflows of low-skilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this paper, we examine if immigration has actually affected fertility exploiting the natural experiment occurred in Italy in 2007, when a large inflow of migrants—many of them specialized in the supply of child care—arrived unexpectedly. With a difference-in-differences method, we show that immigrant female workers have increased native births by a number that ranges roughly from 2% to 4%. We validate our result by the implementation of an instrumental variable approach and several robustness tests, all concluding that the increase in the supply of child-care services by immigrant women has positively affected native fertility.

Keywords

Fertilityhousehold economicsimmigrant laborinternational migration

JEL classification

D12: Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis J61: Geographic Labor Mobility • Immigrant Workers F22: International Migration J13: Fertility • Family Planning • Child Care • Children • Youth
Type
Research Paper
Information
Journal of Demographic Economics , Volume 88 , Issue 4 , December 2022 , pp. 503 - 533
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abramitzky, R., Ager, P., Boustan, L. P., Cohen, E. and Hansen, C. W. (2019) The Effects of Immigration on the Economy: Lessons from the 1920s Border Closure (No. w26536). National Bureau of Economic Research.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Adamopoulou, E. and Kaya, E. (2019) Not Just a Work Permit: EU Citizenship and the Consumption Behavior of Documented and Undocumented Immigrants. IZA Discussion Paper No. 12642.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Adao, R., Kolesár, M. and Morales, E. (2019) Shift-share designs: theory and inference. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 134(4), 1949–2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amuedo-Dorantes, C. and Sevilla, A. (2014) Low-skilled immigration and parenting investments of college-educated mothers in the United States evidence from time-use data. Journal of Human Resources 49(3), 509–539.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bar, M., Hazan, M., Leukhina, O., Weiss, D. and Zoabi, H. (2018) Why did rich families increase their fertility? Inequality and marketization of child care. Journal of Economic Growth 23(4), 427–463.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barone, G., D'Ignazio, A., De Blasio, G. and Naticchioni, P. (2016) Mr. Rossi, Mr. Hu and politics. The role of immigration in shaping natives' voting behavior. Journal of Public Economics 136, 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barone, G. and Mocetti, S. (2011) With a little help from abroad: the effect of low-skilled immigration on the female labour supply. Labour Economics 18(5), 664–675.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartel, A. P (1989) Where do the new US immigrants live? Journal of Labor Economics 7(4), 371–391.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bauernschuster, S., Hener, T. and Rainer, H. (2016) Children of a (policy) revolution: the introduction of universal child care and its effect on fertility. Journal of the European Economic Association 14(4), 975–1005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker, G. S. and Tomes, N. (1976) Child endowments and the quantity and quality of children. Journal of Political Economy 84(4, Part 2), S143–S162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bertrand, M., Duflo, E. and Mullainathan, S. (2004) How much should we trust differences-in-differences estimates? The Quarterly Journal of Economics 119(1), 249–275.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bick, A (2016) The quantitative role of child care for female labor force participation and fertility. Journal of the European Economic Association 14(3), 639–668.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruhn, M. and McKenzie, D. (2009) In pursuit of balance: randomization in practice in development field experiments. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 1(4), 200–232.Google Scholar
Card, D. (2001) Immigrant inflows, native outflows, and the local labor market impacts of higher immigration. Journal of Labor Economics 19(1), 22–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cigno, A. (1991) Economics of the Family. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Clemens, M. A. and Hunt, J. (2019) The labor market effects of refugee waves: reconciling conflicting results. ILR Review 72(4), 818–857.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clemens, M. A., Lewis, E. G. and Postel, H. M. (2018) Immigration restrictions as active labor market policy: evidence from the Mexican bracero exclusion. American Economic Review 108(6), 1468–1487.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
CNEL (2008) Gli Immigrati nel Mercato del Lavoro Italiano. Rome.Google Scholar
Cortes, P. and Pan, J. (2013) Outsourcing household production: foreign domestic workers and native labor supply in Hong Kong. Journal of Labor Economics 31(2), 327–371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cortes, P. and Tessada, J. (2011) Low-skilled immigration and the labor supply of highly skilled women. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3(3), 88–123.Google Scholar
D'Albis, H., Gobbi, P. and Greulich, A. (2017) Having a second child and access to childcare: evidence from European countries. Journal of Demographic Economics 83(2), 177–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forlani, E., Lodigiani, E. and Mendolicchio, C. (2015) Impact of low-skilled immigration on female labour supply. The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 117(2), 452–492.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forlani, E., Lodigiani, E. and Mendolicchio, C. (2021) Natives and migrants in home production: the case of Germany. Review of Economics of the Household 19(4), 1275–1307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Furtado, D. (2016) Fertility responses of high-skilled native women to immigrant inflows. Demography 53(1), 27–53.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Furtado, D. and Hock, H. (2010) Low skilled immigration and work-fertility tradeoffs among high skilled US natives. American Economic Review 100(2), 224–228.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gauthier, A. H. (2007) The impact of family policies on fertility in industrialized countries: a review of the literature. Population Research Policy Review 26, 323–346.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldsmith-Pinkham, P., Sorkin, I. and Swift, H. (2020) Bartik instruments: what, when, why, and how. American Economic Review 110(8), 2586–2624.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greene, W. H. (2003) Econometric Analysis. Pearson Education India. Delhi.Google Scholar
Imbens, G. W. and D. B., Rubin (2015) Causal Inference in Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences. Cambridge University Press. New York.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Istat (2020) Rapporto Annuale 2020. La Situazione del Paese. Rome.Google Scholar
Jaeger, D. A., Ruist, J. and Stuhler, J. (2018) Shift-share instruments and the impact of immigration. National Bureau of Economic Research, No. w24285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kronmal, R. A. (1993) Spurious correlation and the fallacy of the ratio standard revisited. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) 156(3), 379–392.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Llull, J. (2018) Immigration, wages, and education: a labour market equilibrium structural model. The Review of Economic Studies 85(3), 1852–1896.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mariani, R. D., Pasquini, A. and Rosati, F. C. (2020) Elementary Facts about Immigration in Italy: What Do We Know about Immigration and Its Impact?. IZA Discussion Paper No. 13181.Google Scholar
Mastrobuoni, G. and Pinotti, P. (2015) Legal status and the criminal activity of immigrants. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7(2), 175–206.Google Scholar
Mocetti, S. and Porello, C. (2010) How does immigration affect native internal mobility? New evidence from Italy. Regional Science and Urban Economics 40(6), 427–439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murthi, M., Guio, A. C. and Dreze, J. (1995) Mortality, fertility, and gender bias in India: a district-level analysis. Population and Development Review 21(4), 745–782.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ortega, F. and Peri, G. (2014) Openness and income: the roles of trade and migration. Journal of International Economics 92(2), 231–251.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearson, K. (1897) Mathematical contributions to the theory of evolution. On a form of spurious correlation which may arise when indices are used in the measurement of organs. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 60(359–367), 489–498.Google Scholar
Peri, G. (2012) The effect of immigration on productivity: evidence from US states. Review of Economics and Statistics 94(1), 348–358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quintano, C., Castellano, R. and Longobardi, S. (2009) A fuzzy clustering approach to improve the accuracy of Italian student data. An experimental procedure to correct the impact of outliers on assessment test scores. Statistica & Applicazioni 7(2), 149–171.Google Scholar
Riphahn, R. T. and Wiynck, F. (2017) Fertility effects of child benefits. Journal of Population Economics 30(4), 1135–1184.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Romiti, A. (2018) The effects of immigration on household services, labour supply and fertility. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 80(4), 843–869.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seah, K. K. (2018) The effect of immigration shocks on native fertility outcomes: evidence from a natural experiment. IZA Journal of Development and Migration 8(1), 18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, C. L. (2012) The impact of low-skilled immigration on the youth labor market. Journal of Labor Economics 30(1), 55–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Theoharides, C. (2020) The unintended consequences of migration policies on origin country market decision. Journal of Development Economics 142, 102271–102316.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Mariani and Rosati supplementary material

Mariani and Rosati supplementary material 1
Download Mariani and Rosati supplementary material(File)
File 147.8 KB
Supplementary material: PDF

Mariani and Rosati supplementary material

Mariani and Rosati supplementary material 2

Download Mariani and Rosati supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 282.7 KB