Peer Effects on Fertility Decision Making

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究将调查在职女性的生育决定是否以及如何受到同一机构同事生育能力的影响。同伴效应的机制可能是社会性的，如群体规范，也可能是经济性的，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，并可能限制长期的经济增长。女性劳动力市场参与度的提高可能会抵消男性劳动力的减少，但这本身可能会导致生育率下降。在生育率方面以同伴效应的形式存在的工作场所溢出效应，使得妇女工作地点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，生育溢出效应有可能严重放大或抑制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、基于登记册的数据，使我们能够将个人与其雇主和家庭成员联系起来。我们的方法创新是将社会互动建模为博弈论框架中的战略互动，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，并明确适应多重均衡的可能性。我们将控制一系列个人和工作场所特征，并考虑到共同的不可观察的随机冲击影响一个机构中所有女性的生育能力的可能性。我们还将同事兄弟姐妹的生育能力作为工具变量，假设女性可能直接受到其姐妹的生育能力的影响，但不受其同事姐妹的生育能力的影响。实证方法将明确地纳入异质效应，并考虑妇女是否或多或少地对与其教育、职业和生育背景相同的其他人的生育选择作出反应。我们的新实证方法可以广泛应用于具有战略要素的社会互动研究。

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. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The proposed research will contribute to the public health goals of the Demographic and Behavioral Sciences Branch of NICHD by exploring the roles of social and economic peer influences on fertility. The empirical approach developed in this project will also have future applications to study other health behaviors that involve social interactions and strategic considerations.