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Understanding the Effect of Public Policy on Fertility; Secondary Data Analysis [project complete]
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External Links:  ResearchersAbstract:In the light of falling birth rates, this project asks whether government policy can have an influence on fertility decisions. It will do so by looking at the effect on fertility of recent government reforms (the introduction of working families tax credit and the child tax credit) that substantially increased financial support for children. While the stated objective of these reforms was to reduce child poverty, they also changed financial incentives to have children – and did so differentially across different types of households. To set recent changes in context, the project will first use data from the Family Expenditure Survey (1968-2002) to document key trends in fertility over time. The advantage of using such a long time-series of cross-section data is that we will be able to build up fertility profiles for a large number of cohorts of women – from those born in 1930 all the way through to those born in 1980. A particular focus will be to look at cohort patterns in fertility by mother’s education. Constructing fertility histories from cross-section data is not new. One advantage of using a long time-series of repeated cross-section data is to explore some of the measurement and selection issues that arise when fertility is imputed from the ages of older children, by comparing fertility estimates for the same cohort, based on different years’ data. The second stage of the project will focus on the effect of the New Labour reforms using a differences-in-differences (DiD) approach, estimated using data from the British Household Panel Survey. More precisely, we will compare changes in fertility before and after the reforms for “rich” and “poor” households. Assuming there is an own-price effect, we would expect to see a bigger fertility response for “poor” families compared to “rich”, given the bigger increases in child-related support. Of course, we cannot directly define a “poor” treatment group and a “rich” control group on the basis of current income since incomes are likely to change with the arrival of children, and in response to the reforms themselves. Instead, we will need to define the treatment and control groups on the basis of characteristics of the family that are related to whether they are currently “rich” or “poor”, but are not affected by the arrival of children or the introduction of the reforms, including income in previous periods and mother’s and father’s education (and occupation). Department:University of Bristol & Institute for Fiscal Studies Duration:January 2006 - December 2006 Grant Type:Small Research Grant PublicationsAll outputs are detailed on the Society Today database. We have produced two working papers and have submitted the paper on the effect of the 1999 reforms to a top academic economics journal (now Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Population Economics). We have disseminated the findings on cohort trends in fertility widely via non-technical articles in the CMPO Research Bulletin and the ESRC publication, Britain Today. We have also contributed to the UPTAP book on population trends and processes. Smith, S. and Ratcliffe, A. (2009) Women’s education and childbearing: A growing divide, Chapter 3 in Stillwell, J., Coast, E. and Kneale, D. (eds.) Fertility, Living Arrangements, care and Mobility, Understanding Population Trends and Processes Volume 1, Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 41-58. Smith, S and Ratcliffe, A (2006). Fertility and women’s education: A cohort analysis, CMPO working paper (CMPO 06/165), CMPO, University of Bristol. PresentationsOur cohort analysis has been presented on a number of occasions, including Understanding Population Trends and Processes (UPTAP) workshops in March 2006, November 2006 and March 2007, at the British Society of Population Studies conference in September 2006, at the Family Resources Survey User Group meeting in April 2007 and at a seminar at the Institute for Education in October 2007. Our analysis of the effects of the reforms has been presented at the Public Economics UK Conference in December 2006 and at the Conference of the European Society of Population Economists in July 2007, at seminars at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, London and the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex in July 2007 and at numerous UPTAP events, including a special session at the National Research Methods Conference in July 2008. Smith, S and Ratcliffe, A (2007), Understanding the effects of public policy on fertility, Presentation at the Institute for Fiscal Studies seminar, January Smith, S and Ratcliffe, A (2006) Understanding the effects of public policy on fertility, Presentation at the Centre for Market and Public Organisation seminars, March and December. Smith, S and Ratcliffe, A (2006) Understanding the effects of public policy on fertility, Presentation at the Public Economics UK Conference, Institute for Fiscal Studies, December Brewer, M. (2006) Understanding the effects of public policy on fertility, Presentation at the British Society for Population Studies Conference, University of Southampton, September.
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