The Impact of the Second Child on Female Employment. Is It Uniform across European Countries?

Anna Baranowska-Rataj, Warsaw School of Economics

This paper contributes to the discussion on the effects of childbearing on female employment in the developed countries. Previous research has usually either (1) compared the effects of childbearing assuming exogeneity of family size and women’s employment or (2) examined these effects by using methods which consider endogeneity but focused on single countries. We combine these two approaches by taking a cross-country comparative perspective and applying quasi-experimental methods. To this end, we implement IV models, with multiple births as an instrument, to harmonized data from the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). We first examine the cross-country variation in the effect size across European countries. Next, we introduce a series of macro-level policy indicators to investigate whether the revealed cross-country differences can be attributed to the diversity of European institutional arrangements regarding compatibility between employment and family duties.