Abstract
An intertemporal microeconomic model of family decisions emphasising the effects of the mother’s age on the “quality” of the child and the financial implications of interrupting the mother’s career to care for a child is developed to analyse the effects of personal characteristics and of several economic variables on the time-profiles of childbearing and of income raising and spending activities of married couples. The model’s predictions are then used to interpret the decline of completed fertility and the reversal of an earlier tendency towards younger motherhood that has characterised Western Europe over recent years.
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© 1989 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Cigno, A. (1989). The Timing of Births: A Theory of Fertility, Family Expenditures and Labour Market Participation Over Time. In: Wenig, A., Zimmermann, K.F. (eds) Demographic Change and Economic Development. Studies in Contemporary Economics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83789-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83789-0_7
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