Three essays on fertility, labor market performance, and parental mental health

In this dissertation research, the empirical analyses are developed to investigate the causal relationships among fertility, labor supply and parental health. As these three factors are intertwined closely, identifications of causality are achieved through various methods. The first and third chapters construct exogenous variation in fertility through a natural experiment, the One-Child Policy in China. Then the constructed exogenous variation is used as instrument for fertility to identify the causals effects of fertility on female labor supply as well as parental mental health. The second paper analyses the impacts of job displacements on fertility. Several different specifications, including time trend model, fixed effect propensity score matching and regression with narrower definition of job displacement are used to verify the robustness of the causal effects.;I Chapter One, I try to answer the question, "Does fertility play a different role in female labor force participation in China than in the U.S.?" This chapter exploits plausibly exogenous variations in fertility created by the affirmative One-Child Policy in China to estimate the effect of having two or more children on the mother's labor force participation. Using a large data set from the 1990 Population Census, I find that OLS underestimates the negative effects of fertility, and 2SLS estimates imply that conditional on having one child, additional children decreases mother's female labor force participation by 8-15 percentage points in rural China. Recently, China relaxed its One-Child Policy to Two-Children Policy, our finding here provides a perspective for the potential effects of such policy relaxations on female labor supply.;Historical macro data show a negative association between unemployment and fertility. Individual level panel data is needed to explain the causal relationship behind the negative association. Using micro data from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, Chapter Two studies the effect of job displacements on fertility in the U.S. After controlling individual time-invariant heterogeneity, the main regression results indicate that displacements of men will lead to reduced fertility in the following years, while the effect of displacements for women depends on the women's education levels. For women without college education, their fertility will increase four years after displacement. For women with college education, however, no significant effect on fertility is identified. The empirical findings are robust to several different specifications, including time trend model, fixed effect propensity score matching and regression with narrower definition of job displacement. There is an old Chinese saying, "More children, more blessings". Does having more children really promote mental health of the parents in China? To answer this question, Chapter Three exploits plausibly exogenous variations in fertility created by the affirmative One-Child Policy in China to estimate the long-term effect of having more children on the parent's mental health for people age 45 and above in rural areas. Using data from the 2011 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), results show that, after controlling endogeneity in fertility, mothers with more children are found to have a higher probability of experiencing depression symptoms in rural China, while the effects on fathers are generally not significant.