Can Immigrants Help Women "Have it All"? Immigrant Labor and Women's Joint Fertility and Labor Supply Decisions

No 8614, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper explores how inflows of low-skilled immigrants impact the tradeoffs women face when making joint fertility and labor supply decisions. I find increases in fertility and decreases in labor force participation rates among high skilled US-born women in cities that have experienced larger immigrant inflows. Most interestingly, these changes have been accompanied by decreases in the strength of the negative correlation between childbearing and labor force participation, an often-used measure of the difficulty with which women combine motherhood and labor market work. Using a structured statistical model, I show that the immigrant-induced attenuation of this negative correlation can explain about 24 percent of the immigrant-induced increases in the joint likelihood of childbearing and labor force participation in the U.S. between the years 1980 and 2000.

Keywords: immigration; labor force participation; fertility; child care; tetrachoric correlation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 F22 J13 J22 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2014-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-mig
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: IZA Journal of Migration, 2015, 4 (19)

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Journal Article: Can immigrants help women “have it all”? Immigrant labor and women’s joint fertility and labor supply decisions (2015)
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