Abstract
With the relaxation of the One-Child Policy in China, women are likely to face more conflicts between childcare and work. How to boost the fertility rate and facilitate the female labor supply has become an urgent issue in China. With data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) 1993–2015, this study explored the impact of having more than one child on women’s informal employment decisions using three-equation models. The models took into account the sample selection of working-age women in the labor force and the endogeneity of fertility decisions jointly. The results showed that women with more than one child were more likely to choose informal employment. The positive impact of having more children on women’s probability of informal employment was different for each group. Notably, the positive impact was stronger for women with low educational attainment, rural hukou, and especially for rural‒urban migrants. These results were robust to several alternative specifications. These findings suggest that with more children, women in China choose informal employment as a way of balancing work and family.
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Source CHNS 1993–2015
Source CHNS 1993–2015
Source CHNS 1993–2015
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Data Availability
All data generated or analyzed in this study were obtained from eight waves (1993, 1997, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2011 and 2015) of China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), which are available online.
Notes
The total fertility rate is the number of children a woman can expect during her lifetime; 2.1 is the replacement level, the point at which the population stabilizes.
Note that despite this variation, this sample was not representative at the national level, although some evidence showed that characteristics of households and individuals in the data were comparable to those from national samples (Chen et al., 2015).
We dropped observations with urban hukou restricted by the One-Child Policy, which accounted for approximately 80% of women with urban hukou.
After the sample restrictions, there were 6624 observations, of which missing data accounted for nearly 4%.
There were no never-married women in our sample.
Rural‒urban migrants are defined as individuals who had rural hukou but were living in an urban area at the time of the survey. Similarly, urban‒rural migrants are defined as individuals who had urban hukou but were living in a rural area at the time of the survey.
Income is measured in 2015 Chinese Yuan.
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The author would like to thank the editor, Professor Joyce Serido, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and constructive comments that greatly contributed to improving the quality of this paper. The authors are responsible for any remaining errors or omissions.
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This research was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 19BSH074).
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Wu, Y., Tong, L. & Yi, Y. Does Having More Children Affect Women’s Informal Employment Choices? Evidence from China. J Fam Econ Iss (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-023-09915-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-023-09915-x