TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Mariani, Rama Dasi
AU  - Rosati, Furio C.
        TI  - Immigrant Supply of Marketable Child Care and Native Fertility in Italy
        PY  - 2021/Sep/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 14750
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp14750
        AB  - The availability of child-care services has often been advocated as one of the instruments to counter the fertility decline observed in many high-income countries. In the recent past large inflows of low-skilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this paper we examine if immigration has actually affected fertility exploiting the natural experiment occurred in Italy in 2007, when a large inflow of migrants – many of them specialized in the supply of child care – arrived unexpectedly. With a difference-in-differences method, we show that immigrant female workers have increased native births by a number that ranges roughly from 2 to 4 per cent. We validate our result by the implementation of an instrumental variable approach and several robustness tests, all concluding that the increase in the supply of child-care services by immigrant women has positively affected native fertility.
        KW  - immigrant labour
KW  - fertility
KW  - household economics
KW  - international migration
        ER  -