Job insecurity can have wide-ranging consequences outside of the labour market. A 1999 rise in the French layoff tax paid by large private firms when they laid off older workers made younger workers less secure; this insecurity reduced their fertility by 3.7 percentage points (with a 95% confidence interval between 0.7 and 6.6 percentage points). Reduced fertility is only found at the intensive margin: job insecurity reduces family size but not the probability of parenthood itself. Our results also suggest negative selection into parenthood, as this fertility effect does not appear for low-income and less-educated workers.

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1 March 2022

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The Review of Economics and Statistics 104(2) , pp.386-398, 2022

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DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_00964

https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article/doi/10.1162/rest_a_00964/97750/A-Natural-Experiment-on-Job-Insecurity-and

This Journal article is published under the centre's Labour programme, Community Wellbeing programme.