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Immigrant supply of marketable child care and native fertility in Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2021

R. D. Mariani  and
F. C. Rosati Open the ORCID record for F. C. Rosati [Opens in a new window]
R. D. Mariani
Affiliation:
University of Rome “Tor Vergata” and Centre for Economic and International Studies (CEIS), Rome, Italy
F. C. Rosati*
Affiliation:
University of Rome “Tor Vergata” and Centre for Economic and International Studies (CEIS), Rome, Italy
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: f.rosati@economia.uniroma2.it
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Abstract

The availability of child-care services has often been advocated as one of the instruments to counter the fertility decline observed in many high-income countries. In the recent past, large inflows of low-skilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this paper, we examine if immigration has actually affected fertility exploiting the natural experiment occurred in Italy in 2007, when a large inflow of migrants—many of them specialized in the supply of child care—arrived unexpectedly. With a difference-in-differences method, we show that immigrant female workers have increased native births by a number that ranges roughly from 2% to 4%. We validate our result by the implementation of an instrumental variable approach and several robustness tests, all concluding that the increase in the supply of child-care services by immigrant women has positively affected native fertility.

Keywords

Fertilityhousehold economicsimmigrant laborinternational migration

JEL classification

D12: Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis J61: Geographic Labor Mobility • Immigrant Workers F22: International Migration J13: Fertility • Family Planning • Child Care • Children • Youth
Type
Research Paper
Information
Journal of Demographic Economics , Volume 88 , Issue 4 , December 2022 , pp. 503 - 533
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain 2021

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