band’s income. We argue that this pattern is best explained by gender identity norms, which induce an aversion to a situation where the wife earns more than her husband. We present evidence that this aversion also impacts marriage formation, the wife’s labor force participation, the wife’s income conditional on working, marriage satisfaction, likelihood of divorce, and the division of home production. Within marriage markets, when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline. In couples where the wife’s potential income is likely to exceed the husband’s, the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work. In couples where the wife earns more than the husband, the wife spends more time on household chores; moreover, those couples are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. These patterns hold both cross-sectionally and within couples over time.

/pdf/gender-identity-and-relative-income-within-households-2k5adezo2v.pdf

Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households

/pdf/educational-attainment-in-the-united-states-march-1977-and-1j0zlytaod.pdf

Educational Attainment in the United States: March 1977 and 1976. Current Population Reports, Population Characteristics, Series P-20, No. 314.

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/noe/jpube804.pdf

Taxes and the labor market participation of married couples: the earned income tax credit

College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay For It

This paper analyzes the effects of changes in the duration of paid, job-protected parental leave on mothers' higher-order fertility and postbirth labor market careers. Identification is based on a major Austrian reform increasing the duration of parental leave from one year to two years for any child born on or after July 1, 1990. We find that mothers who give birth to their first child immediately after the reform have more second children than prereform mothers, and that extended parental leave significantly reduces return to work. Employment and earnings also decrease in the short run, but not in the long run. Fertility and work responses vary across the population in ways suggesting that both cash transfers and job protection are relevant. Increasing parental leave for a future child increases fertility strongly but leaves short-run postbirth careers relatively unaffected. Partially reversing the 1990 extension, a second 1996 reform improves employment and earnings while compressing the time between births.

https://serval.unil.ch/resource/serval:BIB_E3338278A56A.P001/REF

How Does Parental Leave Affect Fertility and Return to Work? Evidence from Two Natural Experiments

Because the tax savings of having a child are a realized only if the birth takes place before midnight, January 1, the incentives for the “marginal” birth are substantial. Using a sample of children from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we find that the probability that a child is born in the last week of December, rather than the first week of January, is positively correlated with tax benefits. We estimate that increasing the tax benefit of having a child by $500 raises the probability of having the child in the last week of December by 26.9 percent.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/250054

Taxes and the Timing of Births

Government programs designed to provide income safety nets often restrict eligibility to families with children, creating an unintended fertility incentive. This paper considers whether dramatically changing incentives in the earned income tax credit affect fertility rates in the USA. We use birth certificate data spanning the period 1990 to 1999 to test whether expansions in the credit influenced birthrate among targeted families. While economic theory would predict a positive fertility effect of the program for many eligible women, our results indicate that expanding the credit produced only extremely small reductions in higher order fertility among white women.

/pdf/the-earned-income-tax-credit-and-fertility-20fwycoq1n.pdf

The earned income tax credit and fertility

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) could either penalize or subsidize marriage. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and controlling for individual fixed effects and the ...

EITC and Marriage

During the 1990’s the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) emerged as a primary means of providing income support for low-income families in the United States. In an effort to keep the program well targeted, the credit largely restricts eligibility to tax filers with children. One potentially unintended consequence of this design is that it might encourage childbearing. We raise the question of whether the EITC, through its generous benefits to families with children, actually increases fertility. We approach this topic for three reasons. The first is to expand upon an existing literature of economic incentives and fertility using the EITC expansion as a large exogenous variation in the price of childbearing. Findings in the welfare literature are inconclusive (Robert A. Moffitt, 1998), and the income tax literature typically finds small, but statistically significant effects of the income-tax system on fertility behavior (e.g., Leslie A. Whittington et al., 1990). Second, declining fertility rates in many Western counties raise the general issue of whether the tax system can be used as a tool for encouraging fertility. Finally, by considering the link between the EITC and fertility, we question a common, yet untested, assumption in the literature on the EITC and the labor supply of single parents: that the presence of a child is exogenous to the value of the EITC.

Did Expanding the EITC Promote Motherhood

Many government programs have implicit penalties or subsidies for marriage. For example, many couples pay higher income taxes when married than their combined tax liabilities as single filers, while many other couples receive a marriage subsidy because their joint taxes fall with marriage. Likewise, most low-income couples are eligible for higher welfare benefits if they are separated rather than married. This article discusses the marriage penalty, with a particular focus on tax and transfer programs. Why does it exist? Who faces it? To what extent does it affect marriage and labor market behavior? What tradeoffs are involved in reducing it?

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.13.3.193

Stacy Dickert-Conlin

Papers

Taxes and the Timing of Births

The earned income tax credit and fertility

EITC and Marriage

Did Expanding the EITC Promote Motherhood

Policy Watch The Marriage Penalty