The education, work and fertility decisions of women

Understanding how education, work, and fertility decisions interact has important implications for the design of policy, and for assessing the causes behind the remarkable change in the economic circumstances of women over the... [ view full abstract ]

Understanding how education, work, and fertility decisions interact has important implications for the design of policy, and for assessing the causes behind the remarkable change in the economic circumstances of women over the past half-century. This paper develops a dynamic lifecycle model of these decisions in a setting where wages depend on accumulated experience and savings provide an important means of self-insurance. The parameters of the model are estimated using data from the UK, where major policy reforms in the 1980s significantly increased the financial incentive for second earners to be in full-time paid work. Adopting a quasi-experimental framework, I show that in the short run these reforms led to an increase in the employment rate of women, but that the dynamic model predicts long-run effects could be much larger.

== NOTE: substantially revised version in progress ==