The Impact of Flexibility at Work on Fertility

Abstract

Leveraging the first Covid-19 lockdown in Norway as a laboratory for an increase in work flexibility, we uncover a significant and persistent increase in births nine months later. Using the Goldin (2014) measure of work flexibility based on occupation characteristics, we show that fertility increases were concentrated among women in “greedy jobs” with lower flexibility prior to lockdown. We formalise this intuition in a theoretical model where an increase in flexibility reduces child cost and boosts the fertility of higher earning women, under relatively simple theoretical assumptions. We empirically confirm additional implications of the model. The increase in work flexibility under Covid-19 lockdown allowed high-earning women in greedy jobs to alleviate the career-family trade-off.

Keywords: Work flexibility, Fertility, Career-Family Trade-off