Effect Of The Employment Of The Old On The Birth Behavior Of The Young

Fertility rates of China are falling all the time because of the Family Planning Program. They reached 1.19 in the sixth census of 2010. At the same time, the life expectancy of the old is increasing day by day. The aging problem of China is increasingly serious, but the legal retirement age of the old has not been changed. In order to deal with the development of the population aging problems, policies of postponing of retirement age have been considered by relevant departments of our government. Debate about delay retirement policies have been discussed heatedly by-scholars at home and abroad, many studies have confirmed that the employment of the old cannot substitute the employment of the youth, the postponing of the retirement age will give rise to the loss of employment of the youth. But in recent years this appointment has been refuted systematically. More and more empirical evidence suggests that extending of retirement age of the old will not squeeze out the employment of the youth. On the contrary, a large number of evidence proves that the extending of retirement age has a positive effect to the employment of the youth. As a result, many countries launch delay retirement age policies based on the theory of the no substitution between the old employment and the young fertility. Whether delay retirement policies are suitable for the situation of our country or not? Obviously, theory of the no substitution between the old employment and the young employment is not enough according to the reality of China.When we talk about the feasibility of the delay retirement policies, we must take the influence to the future labor market not only the influence to the present market into consideration. In China, the employment rate of women is high. Meanwhile, the preschool education system is not perfect enough. The two reasons give rise to the common raising beyond generation. The domestic labor transfers among family members, namely the elderly have a tendency to give up work to help busy children to take care of their children. But if the retirement age of the old was extended by the government, the elderly will be forced to stay in the Labor market. It is hard for them to reduce labor supply to help children casually. As a result, a great number of children will not choose to give birth to children. Based on the analysis above, we must pay attention to whether the employment of old people has a negative effect on young people’s employment. The purpose of this article is to investigate whether there is such a negative correlation between the employments of the elderly and the fertility behavior of the young.In order to investigate the relationship between the elderly employment and fertility behavior of the young people, in this paper, we will seek help from empirical studies based on previous theoretical. Firstly, we apply 2005 one percent of national population sampling survey data and the 2010 national census data for visual description and analysis. From the results we can draw the conclusion that the employment of the elderly has a negative effect to the young people choices of birth which is in consistent with our estimation. But it just reflects the negative relationship between employment of the elderly and birth behavior of young people. We cannot draw any causal relationship between the two. In order to further investigate the causal relationship between the employment of the elderly and the birth choices of the young, we turn to micro level, using data of China health and retirement survey(CHARLS) to study whether the extending retire age of parents will affect fertility behavior of their children. CHARLS is the baseline survey data. This article uses the micro national household survey data in 2011 and 2013 comprehensively. Two empirical strategies are used to validate the negative influence between the old employment and birth choices of the young family. First of all, this paper adopts the traditional least squares (OLS) model to estimate the negative relation we talk about above. But we must aware that the traditional least squares have its disadvantages which cannot be avoided. Traditional ordinary least squares method cannot deal with endogenous problem perfectly, the result is not significant in statistics. In order to deal with endogenous problem properly, this paper then uses the two-stage least squares method (2 SLS), selecting high blood pressure which is one of the representations of the chronic illnesses as a tool variable. The reason why we choose high blood pressure as the tool variable is that hypertension has become senile diseases which have been proved have vital influence on the elderly labor supply. At the same time, in order to compare the different role of the old men and old women in raising grandchildren, we will divide the samples into two parts based on gender.Through the empirical result of the two-stage least squares method we draw three obvious conclusions. First of all, through the first phase of the two-stage least squares regression results we find that high blood has a significant pressure on the labor supply of the elderly. These research results are consistent with our daily experience. Second, the second stage of the egression results tells us that the labor supply of elderly have a significant negative impact to the choice of their children’s birth rate. We hold the view that this negative impact is mainly due to the existence of raising transfer of labor between family members. At the same time, by comparing the two samples, we find that old men and old women have no difference in the raising of their grandchildren. As to the reasons, we think it is due to the vague social division of labor and the increasing participation rate of male in the housework. Raising responsibility of older men and older women has no obvious difference, but it still needs further validation.In this paper, the main innovation is that it is the first time we take the negative impact of the employment of the old to the birth behavior of the youth into consideration when we analyze of the feasibility of delay retirement policies. It is also the first time we take raising beyond generation mode into labor market supply analysis framework. In order to provide an empirical basis to the government when it carries out delay retirement policies, this article does analyze the delay retirement policies’impact on the future labor market. This can avoid that when the policies are implemented labor transfer among the family members will be ignored. At the same time, the distortion of the extending of elderly retirement age on the birth rate of the young cannot be underestimated. Apart from the innovation of the article, there are shortcomings of the article. Based on the result of the 2SLS, we know that there is no difference in the role of older men and older women in the raising of their grandchildren. As to the result, this article only gives the theoretical basis, lacking of further evidence to proof it.