Fertility, women's labour supply and family policies ; Fécondité, offre de travail féminin et politiques familiales

Abstract

This PhD dissertation studies the impact of number of children and of social interactions on mothers' labour supply. To determine the extent to which the link between number of children and mothers' labour supply is causal, we use two random events that affect the number of children: having same sex eldest siblings and twin births at the second pregnancy. Results suggest that having more than two children reduces mothers' participation in the labour market by 20 percentage points and the number of hours worked by employed mothers by 2 hours per week. We then analyze how the institutional context alters the effect of the number of children on mothers 'participation in the labour market. First, we find that before 1994, when the Allocation parentale d'éducation was intended for parents of three children or more, having more than two children decreases significantly mothers' activity. After the extension of the benefit to mothers with two children, this is not the case anymore and the negative effect of having a second child on their activity is stronger. Second, our results indicate that in departments where the access of two-year-old children to pre-elementary public schools is low, having more than two children has a significant negative impact on mothers' activity. On the contrary, the effect is insignificant in departments where this access is high. We finally examine the effect of neighbourhood social interactions on mothers' activity. Mobilzing different exogenous sources of variation of close neighbours' activity, we find that neighbours' activity positively affects a mother's individual participation. ; Cette thèse porte sur l'impact du nombre d'enfants et des interactions sociales de voisinage sur l'offre de travail des mères de famille. Nous proposons d'abord une étude sur la nature du lien entre nombre d'enfants et offre de travail des mères. Pour déterminer si cette relation est causale, nous utilisons deux évènements qui affectent aléatoirement le nombre d'enfants : le fait d'avoir deux aînés de même ...