Project financed by the National Science Centre, aiming at providing insight into the costs and benefits that European parents face if they decide to have more than one child.

 

In this project we assess whether siblings affect negatively educational chances and intellectual development of children. We evaluate the impact of the number of children on parents’ employment career. Finally, we look at the parental costs and benefits of having many children in the latest phase of life. Specifically, we focus on the chances of receiving support from adult children.

In our analysis, we consider the role of cultural and institutional context of European societies. This will allow showing whether the costs of having larger families can be reduced by some social policy instruments.

 

The “natural experiments” related to human reproduction are an increasingly often applied strategy for assessment of the family size effects on female employment. The aim of this paper is to review theoretical concepts and the available empirical evidence on studies that implement this methodological approach.

Most studies confirm that the number of children does have a negative effect on female employment, net of the impact of women’s preferences regarding involvement in home-based versus paid work. Research provides consistent evidence on the way in which the effect of the number of children depends on parity and weakens over time, as the child becomes older. There is no consensus on the way that individual resources and preferences moderate the effect of family size on employment, however. Surprisingly little attention has been paid so far to the variation in the magnitude of family size effect according to living arrangements and country-specific contexts.

 

Abstract:
This paper contributes to the discussion on the effects of the number of children on female employment in Europe. Previous research has usually either (1) compared these effects across countries assuming exogeneity of family size or (2) used methods which deal with endogeneity of family size but focused on single countries. We combine these two approaches by taking a cross-country comparative perspective and applying quasi-experimental methods.
We use instrumental variable models, with multiple births as instruments, and the harmonized data from the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). We first examine the cross-country variation in the effects of family size on maternal employment across the groups of European countries with similar welfare state regimes. Next, to measure the impact of welfare state regimes in a more precise way, we implement the Index for the Conditions of Work and Family Reconciliation, i.e. a synthetic indicator that captures the impact of family policies, social norms and labour market conditions. This step gives us an opportunity to investigate whether the revealed cross-country differences in the magnitude of the effect of the family size on maternal employment can be attributed to the diversity of European institutional arrangements as well as cultural and structural conditions for combining employment and family duties.

 

An extensive literature review has been carried out within FAMSIZE project in order to select the most important institutional and cultural determinants moderating the impact of family size on the following dimension of the quality of life of European families:
- parents’ employment career;
- educational chances of children;
- chances of receiving support from adult children by elderly parents.
The indicators selected for this project include:
- policies supporting reconciliation of work and family duties as well as social attitudes  related to parental employment
- state support for families with children and cultural values reducing the so called quality-quantity trade-off in parental investments in children
- Institutional support for care for elderly and filial norms regarding provision of care for parents.
The results of this work are available in the enclosed excel file.