Èric Roca Fernández
(IRES, UCLouvain)
will give a presentation on
If Children Suffer when Mothers Work, Do Women Work Less?
Abstract : Mothers want children to survive. Yet, in developing countries, women can involuntarily endanger them by working if children are left unattended or cared by siblings or less experienced custodians. In that context, parents may face a trade-off between the additional income a working wife can bring home and child mortality. This paper establishes that these considerations are accounted for at the household level, providing a new mechanism to explain female labour participation differentials. First, a simple, theoretical model is created to illustrate the trade-off.Later, a prediction of the model is empirically tested: female participation rates decrease when child mortality differentials between working and non-working mothers widen, conditional on husband’s income. Using data from the DHS, we compute several measures of the child mortality gap between working and non-working mothers and find robust, empirical evidence consistent with model predictions. In general, wives in well-off families work less when doing so increases child mortality. The result only applies to families with young children. The same findings surface when child mortality differentials are ethnic-specific.