【Empirical seminar】Childbirth as a Penalty for Women? Examining Intra-household Bargaining and Welfare Implications
2024/03/05
研討會日期 : 2024-03-05
時間 : 15:00
主講人 : Professor Naijia Guo (郭乃嘉)
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Professor Naijia Guo received her PhD from University of Pennsylvania in 2014. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests are Labor Economics and Family Economics.
演講摘要 : This paper investigates the impact of childbirth on a wife's bargaining power and welfare by analyzing the combined effects of labor market responses and adjustments in intra-household resource allocations. Using the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers (1993-2019) and an event study approach, we find that childbirth leads to a much smaller decline in family earnings compared to the wife's earnings (20.60% vs. 63.06%). However, the wife's private consumption relative to her husband's decreases by 40.93% following childbirth, indicating a significant reduction in her bargaining power. We develop a collective bargaining framework to estimate the effects of fertility on the bargaining power of wives and husbands, their preferences for consumption and leisure, and their productivity for public goods. Our results show that the arrival of a child leads to a substantial increase in the preference for public goods. However, the wife's bargaining power drops by 34.30% after childbirth, causing a decline in welfare for wives by 11.56% but an increase for husbands by 11.02%. Without the decline in bargaining power, the welfare of wives should have increased by 5.24%.
