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.