Peer Effects on Fertility Decision Making

描述(申请人提供)：这项研究将调查职业女性的生育决定是否以及如何受到她们在相同机构的同事的生育能力的影响。同辈效应的机制可能是社会性的，如团体规范，也可能是经济的，如职业竞争。了解职业妇女的生育决定具有高度的政策重要性，因为在许多发达国家，低于更替水平的生育率破坏了养老金和再分配制度的可持续性，并可能限制长期经济增长。更多的女性劳动力市场参与可能会抵消男性劳动力减少的影响，但本身可能会导致生育率下降。工作场所溢出效应在生育率方面以同伴效应的形式存在，这使得妇女在哪里工作的分布成为预测生育率的一个重要考虑因素，而不仅仅是她们是否工作。此外，生育溢出有可能严重放大或削弱对政策变化的行为反应。我们将使用关于丹麦人口的高质量、详细的、基于登记的数据，使我们能够将个人与其雇主和家庭成员联系起来。我们的方法创新是在博弈论框架中将社会互动建模为战略互动，在此基础上我们将开发一种经验方法，同时考虑同一工作场所所有代理人的生育选择，并明确考虑多重均衡的可能性。我们将控制一系列个人和工作场所的特征，并考虑到常见的不可观察到的随机冲击影响机构所有女性生育能力的可能性。我们还将把同事的兄弟姐妹的生育能力作为工具变量，假设女性可能会直接受到姐妹生育能力的影响，但不会受到同事姐妹生育能力的影响。经验方法将明确纳入异质性影响，并考虑女性对教育、职业和生育背景相同的其他人的生育选择是或多或少做出反应。我们的新的经验方法可以广泛地应用于研究具有战略因素的社会互动。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This research will investigate whether and how working women's fertility decisions are affected by the fertility of their co-workers at the same establishments. The mechanism for peer effects may be social in nature, as in group norms, or economic, such as professional competition. Understanding fertility decisions for working women is of heightened policy importance, because sub-replacement fertility rates in much of the developed world undermine the sustainability of pension and redistribution systems, and may limit long-run economic growth. Greater female labor market participation may offset the declining male workforce, but may itself lead to lower fertility rates. The presence of workplace spillovers in the form of peer effects in fertility makes the distribution of where women work an important consideration, beyond simply if they work, in predicting fertility. Furthermore, fertility spillovers have the potential to seriously amplify or dampen behavioral response to policy changes. We will use high-quality, detailed, register-based data on the population of Denmark that allows us to link individuals to their employers and family members. Our methodological innovation is to model social interactions as strategic interactions in a game theoretic framework, upon which we will develop an empirical approach that simultaneously considers the fertility choices of all agents at the same workplace and explicitly accommodates the possibility of multiple equilibria. We will control for a range of personal and workplace characteristics, and allow for the possibility that common unobservable random shocks affect the fertility of all women at an establishment. We will also use co-workers' siblings' fertility as instrumental variables, under the assumption that women may be directly affected by the fertility of their sisters, but not by the fertility of their co-workers' sisters. The empirical approach will explicitly incorporate heterogeneous effects, and consider if women are more or less responsive to the fertility choices of others who share their educational, career and fertility backgrounds. Our novel empirical approach can be applied broadly to the study of social interactions with strategic elements.