Fertility and Life Satisfaction in Rural Ethiopia

Despite recent strong interest in the link between fertility and subjective well-being, the focus has centered on developed countries. For poorer countries, in contrast, the relationship remains rather elusive. Using a well-established panel survey—the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey (ERHS)—we investigate the empirical relationship between fertility and life satisfaction in rural Ethiopia, the largest landlocked country in Africa. Consistent with the fertility theories for developing countries and with the sociodemographic characteristics of rural Ethiopia, we hypothesize that this relationship varies by gender and across life stages, being more positive for men and for parents in old age. Indeed, our results suggest that older men benefit the most in terms of life satisfaction from having a large number of children, while the recent birth of a child is detrimental for the subjective well-being of women at reproductive ages. We address endogeneity issues by using lagged life satisfaction in ordinary least squares regressions, through fixed-effects estimation and the use of instrumental variables.     

Marital disruption and economic well-being: a comparative analysis

Summary.  Though there is a considerable literature concerned with the economic consequences of marital breakdown, there is still substantial disagreement in terms of its magnitude. One of the major problems underlying this debate is how economic well-being is defined. We implement several measures of well-being of monetary and multidimensional nature by using data from the European Community Household Panel. Another issue in this literature concerns selection bias of divorcing couples. We tackle this issue by using a propensity score matching technique combined with a difference-in-differences estimator. Results confirm the importance of the definition of well-being. We find a strong gender bias when using monetary measures but a considerably lower bias, and for some countries non-existent, when using non-monetary indices.     

Work–Family Conflict Moderates the Relationship Between Childbearing and Subjective Well-Being

Many empirical studies find that parents are not as happy as non-parents or that parenthood exerts a negative effect on subjective well-being (SWB). We add to these findings by arguing that there is a key moderating factor that has been overlooked in previous research, i.e. the level of work–family conflict. We hypothesize that the birth of a child means an increase in the level of work–family tension, which may be substantial for some parents and relatively weak for others. To outline such an approach, we estimate fixed-effects models using panel data from the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia survey. We find that childbearing negatively affects SWB only when parents, mothers in particular, face a substantial work–family conflict, providing thus support for our hypothesis.     

An empirical investigation into the effect of childbearing on economic wellbeing in Europe

This paper investigates the extent childbearing among couples in Europe affects their level of economic well being. We do so by implementing a propensity score matching procedure in combination with a difference-in-difference estimator. Using data from European Community Household Panel Survey (ECHP), we compare how the impact of childbearing on wellbeing varies among countries. We use several measures for wellbeing, including poverty status and various deprivation indices that take into account the multidimensionality of individuals‘ assessment of wellbeing. Not unexpected we find childbearing tend to worsen the economic wellbeing of households, but with important differences in magnitude across countries. In Scandinavian countries the effect is small and rarely significant, it is strong in the UK and also significant in Mediterranean countries. Depending on the measure of wellbeing, we find important differences among countries that are similar in terms of welfare provision.     

The Parenthood Happiness Puzzle: An Introduction to Special Issue

Contrary to conventional wisdom, recent studies argue that parenthood is not necessarily related to higher parental subjective well-being (SWB). However, parenthood remains an important aspect of adults’ lives, also in highly developed societies where childbearing has become optional, financially expensive and affecting other goals in life. Whereas a great deal of effort has been put into answering why fertility is low in so many developed countries, one may even ask why is it not even lower. The answer is not obvious but stems from the fact that, to date, the relationship between fertility and SWB has been understudied and the mechanisms at work are not well understood. This special issue makes a step forward in this line of research, providing a coherent set of papers addressing different dimensions of the relationship between fertility and SWB and its mechanisms, starting from a demographic perspective, but integrating theories and research results from other disciplines. The collection of papers assesses the effect of the birth of a child on the individual SWB from angles still unexplored with the idea that the effects of fertility on individuals’ SWB are diverse depending on individual, couple and country contextual factors.     

A first glance into the black box of life satisfaction surrounding childbearing

The vast majority of studies looking into the relationship between childbearing and subjective well-being use overall measures where respondents either report their general level of happiness or their life satisfaction, leaving substantial doubt about the underlying mechanisms. However, life satisfaction and happiness are intuitively multidimensional concepts, simply because there cannot be only one aspect that affects individuals' well-being. In this study, by considering seventeen specific life satisfaction domains, these features come out very clearly. Whereas all the domains considered matter for the overall life satisfaction, only three of them, namely satisfaction with leisure, health and satisfaction with the partnership, change dramatically surrounding childbearing events. Even though we cannot generalise (since these results stem from one particular panel survey, i.e., Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia data), it appears that the typical anticipation and post-child decrease of life satisfaction, so often found in existing studies, stems from changes in these three domains.

     

Single-mother families and the gender gap in children’s time investment and non-cognitive skills

Review of Economics of the Household - This paper analyzes the role of family structure in the gender gap in children’s time investment in studying and non-cognitive skills. We focus on...     

The gender division of housework after the first child: a comparison among Bulgaria,France and the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

In our study, we adopt a comparative-longitudinal perspective on the gender division of housework before and after the birth of the first child, exploiting the first two waves of the Gender and Generation Survey and comparing three countries belonging to different gender and welfare regimes (i.e. Bulgaria, France and the Netherlands). We find that childrearing everywhere triggers a re-traditionalisation, generating a more inegalitarian gender division of housework, yet with interesting differences across countries. Fixed-effect regression analyses of the pooled data show that changes when becoming parents are less pronounced in France with respect to Bulgaria and the Netherlands, more pronounced when she is low-educated. Moreover, when countries are analysed separately, it emerges that it is only in the Netherlands that traditionalisation around first childbirth is significantly lower in couples where the woman is middle- and high-educated compared to those where she is low-educated. Economic, cultural and institutional contexts do matter. Traditionalisation and within-couples polarisation is weaker in contexts where non-traditional attitudes are widespread, social policies are more defamilialising and more explicitly addressed also to men, and where part-time is not the main reconciliation strategy, as in France.