The impact of the income uncertainty on fertility rate
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Chen, Ching-An
Abstract
Most studies have shown that the economic recession will affect the family fertility decision because the income uncertainty general labor faces will increase during the recession. They worry that the reduction in the expected income will make them not have sufficient financial capability to rear the child so they choose to postpone their timing of the childbearing or abandon their reproductive plan. But in Taiwan, the institution of the public servant provides high job security for public servants, so my study expects that public servant’s fertility decision will not be affected by the impact of the recession. This study uses the data compiled from the “National Health Insurance Research Database” (NHIRD) which records the birth records of the domestic entire women from 1996 to 2011. I take advantage of the characteristic of the recession unpredicted by most people, so this study can take the 2001 and 2008 economic recessions as external shocks to estimate the impact of the income uncertainty on the fertility decision for general labor women and public servant women. This study applies the Cox proportional hazard model and the Difference-in-Difference method to estimate. The Cox proportional hazard model estimation results show that, relative to normal economic times, non-civil servant insurance women are likely to postpone their reproductive plan during the recession. Whether the model uses the unemployment rate or the economic growth rate as the main explanatory variable, the Difference-in-Difference method estimation results show that the conclusions are consistent. In the periods of the high unemployment rate or the low economic growth rate, labor insurance women tend to postpone their reproductive plan, and vice versa. However, the fertility decisions of the civil servant insurance women aren’t affected by the fluctuation of the business cycle. In short, the empirical results support the findings of the previous literatures: the lower the income uncertainty women face, the lower the impact of the recession on their fertility decision.
Subjects
生育率
所得不確定性
經濟衰退
公務人員
Type
thesis
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