The purpose of this assignment is to give you some experience reading and writing about articles from the scholarly literature.
The article you will discuss in this assignment is “The Effect of a First Child on Female Labor Supply: Evidence from Women Seeking Fertility Services.” The article was written by Julian Cristia and appeared in The Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 43:3, pp. 487-510 in 2008.
Your assignment is to write a short essay on this topic. Your essay will include a brief summary of the paper, answers to some questions, and some brief analysis.
Follow bullet points 1 to 9 below to structure your essay.
1. Introduction: in a maximum of 2 paragraphs, mention the title and the author of the article, summarize what the article is about and what the author found.
• The summary should motivate why the study is exciting and important.
• Please do not simply copy the abstract. I want to see a short introduction that you put together.
2. What is the causal effect of interest in the paper? Be specific.
3. Consider the following quote from page 488 of the paper “Although we have a number of robust correlations, there are very few credible inferences that can be drawn from them.” What problem is being discussed in this quote? Discuss how unobserved characteristics could threaten the identification of the causal effect. Give an example of what one of these unobservables might be.
4. The author refers to a paper by Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders (2005) on pages 488-489. Illustrate how those authors tackled the endogeneity problem (i.e., the presence of unobservable characteristics that may both affect the decision to have a child and labor supply).
• You do not need to read the paper by Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders to answer bullet point 4.
5. How does the author propose to mitigate the problem you described in Question 3? Do you think his approach removes all possible sources of bias?
6. On page 491, the author describes a key identification assumption. Using the potential outcomes framework, the observed outcome for a treated woman (a woman who succeeds in having a child) is E[Employment (with child) |Child =1]. Write down the counterfactual for this outcome. What does the author use as the counterfactual in the current paper?
7. Refer to the descriiptive statistics for the HELP sample, shown in Table 2. What is the difference in the sample proportion of women employed in month 21 between the treatment and control groups? Interpret this difference. What does it suggest to you?
8. On Page 489, the author states that “having a first child younger than one year old reduces female employment by 26 percentage points. Refer to a specific table in the paper and specific table entries supporting the author’s assertion.
9. Provide a brief conclusion for your essay.
