Ohinata, Asako (2011) Financial incentives and the timing of birth. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This thesis studies how financial incentives affect women's fertility timing decisions. Each chapter investigates this question by looking at a policy that exogenously increased fertility related financial incentives. The timing impacts of these policies are estimated using a discrete-time proportional hazard model with unobserved heterogeneity. In the first chapter, the impact of the 1999 UK Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC) on the timing of birth is studied. This paper employs the 1991-2003 waves of the British Household Panel Survey and identifies the policy impact of WFTC by observing the change in the timing of birth using a difference in differences estimator. The main finding of this paper suggests little evidence of changes in the timing of all birth parity apart from first birth. Such a finding is likely to be explained by the policy design of WFTC that increased not only the fertility but also the labour supply incentives simultaneously. Moreover, a further analysis highlights the importance of other policies, which also in uenced women's labour supply during the period of study. The second chapter, on the other hand, studies the impact of the 1977-2001 US infertility health insurance mandates, which regulated the insurance companies to cover for infertility treatment cost. Although the majority of the past literature has studied impacts on older women who are likely to seek treatment, this paper proposes that the mandates may have had a wider impact on the US population. Specifically, it may have given an option for younger women to delay birth since these policies reduced the opportunity cost of having a child in the future. The chapter employs the 1980-2001 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Results suggest a significant delay of 1-2 years in the time of first birth among highly educated white women.

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