Modelling fertility and human capital : a gender specific approach

Abstract

Due to the changes in fertility and its familiar circumstances, like the timing of births and family structures, over the last century, fertility models had to be revised to reproduce and explain the observed empirical data. One very recent introduced feature in the framework of fertility models that can be key to analyze the current developments in the society is to assume gender speci c agents with gender speci c wages, educational choices and tasks in the household. In this master thesis I will present two papers that focus on these gender speci c aspects in fertility models. The rst, "A model of voluntary childlessness" by Gobbi (2013), concentrates on gender speci c agents with speci c fertility choices, the consequential eects on the matching process of spouses in the marriage market and as an outcome of this on the number of children. Furthermore, Gobbi introduces a fertility framework in which it can be an optimal solution for parents to stay childless, depending on their joint taste for children. Moreover, in her paper she shows the quite unintuitive result, that, under certain circumstances and assumptions, the correlation between childlessness and fertility can be positive. The second paper I present, "Gender Inequality, Endogenous Cultural Norms, and Economic Development" by Hiller (2014), focuses on the quality instead of the quantity of children. Hiller introduces the gender speci c aspect by assuming that girls and boys do receive a gender speci c amount of education during their childhood. He chooses a framework in which parents always have exactly two children and decide the amount of education they provide to them dependent on an endogenous social norm of the society, without knowing that their decision will in uence the future development of the norm. The social norm is driven by the female labour force participation, which itself is contingent on the wage and the human capital which is determined by the gender speci c amount of education girls receive during their childhood. With his analysis Hiller identi es three dierent states of the society and gives policy advices, how a society can escape a low productive poverty regime and converge into a high productive steady state in which gender equality is accomplished.