Fertility and the Personal Exemption: Comment / Richard Crump, Gopi Shah Goda, Kevin Mumford.

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Crump, Richard

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w15984.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2010.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: One of the most commonly cited studies on the effect of child subsidies on fertility, Whittington, Alm and Peters (1990), claimed a large positive effect of child tax benefits on fertility using time series methods. We revisit this question in light of recent increases in child tax benefits by replicating this earlier study and extending the analysis. We do not find strong evidence to justify the model specification from the original paper. Moreover, even if the original specfication is appropriate, we show that the Whittington et al. results are not robust to more general measures of child tax benefits. While we do not find evidence that child tax benefits affect the level of fertility, we find some evidence of a short-run fertility response that occurs with a two-year lag.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w15984 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

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May 2010.

One of the most commonly cited studies on the effect of child subsidies on fertility, Whittington, Alm and Peters (1990), claimed a large positive effect of child tax benefits on fertility using time series methods. We revisit this question in light of recent increases in child tax benefits by replicating this earlier study and extending the analysis. We do not find strong evidence to justify the model specification from the original paper. Moreover, even if the original specfication is appropriate, we show that the Whittington et al. results are not robust to more general measures of child tax benefits. While we do not find evidence that child tax benefits affect the level of fertility, we find some evidence of a short-run fertility response that occurs with a two-year lag.