Conference Paper
The Tradeoff between Child Quantity and Child Quality: Testing Becker’s Q-Q Model and Long-terms Effects on Women Using Data from Egypt
No.
ERF30_3
Publisher
ERF
Date
March, 2024
Becker's (1960) seminal work on the economics of fertility introduced the child quantity-quality (Q-Q) tradeoff model. The Q-Q model investigates how households maximize their utility from having children, given expenditure on child-rearing and the opportunity cost of childbearing. The Q-Q tradeoff explains whether the quantity of children significantly determines the quality of children in a household. Using data over a period of 24 years from Egypt, this research tests for the existence and quantifying of the effect of fertility on child welfare, and long-term labor market outcomes for women in a developing country. I find no strong evidence of the existence of the QQ tradeoff in Egypt. Fertility does not affect the daughter’s education, nor does it affect the daughter’s labor force participation. I also find that the availability of nearby public sector jobs is associated with reducing family size but does not increase the probability of the daughter’s employment. The results obtained suggest that fertility has no effect on child schooling in Egypt between 1998 and 2018. This research informs recent family planning efforts in Egypt, on the socioeconomic returns of reducing fertility rates and help understand the determinants of gender differentials in human capital investment. The results also provide evidence for whether long-term labor market outcomes for females are affected by family size.
Authors
Hosam Ibrahim
PhD student, Department of Applied Economics, University...