On January 18th from 10:00 to 11.00, Adrián Nieto Castro, University of Nottingham, will give a seminar on "Permanent Employment and the Fertility Decision".

The event will take place in room B, first floor, building B.

Abstract:

This paper shows that permanent employment contracts are important drivers of the fertility decision. I provide causal evidence by using variation in subsidies to employers transforming temporary jobs into permanent in Spain as instrument for permanent employment. The amount of the subsidy markedly varies across regions, with the age and gender of the workers whose contract is converted, and within these three dimensions over time. Using a large administrative individual-level panel dataset, I show that permanent contracts have a positive impact on the fertility decision of men, but no effect for women. Several findings suggest that the effect declines when individuals are more likely to have a higher opportunity cost of having a child. I find that permanent employment has a lower impact on fertility when individuals are young, have a high wage growth, or do not cohabit with a partner. Based on a different regional level dataset, I replicate the findings from the main analysis and quantify the aggregate effects of the subsidies, which raised fertility by 2% at a cost of 13,300 euros per child.