Children And Female Self Employment --澳洲Paper代写范文

澳洲Paper代写范文:“Children And Female Self Employment ”，这篇论文主要描述的是有调查报告显示女性生育能力与其从事的工作类型有着正相关的关系，在时间灵活和时间控制严格的工作中，大部分女性会更喜欢选择时间灵活的工作或自我就业，女性为了能够保持较为良好的生育能力，更愿意成为自雇人士，那么事实的真相真的是如此吗？本文将通过假设试验来进行探讨。

While several empirical analysis report a positive relationship between fertility and the probability of women to be self-employed, recent studies have called into question the validity of competing interpretations because of endogeneity issues. This paper studies two competing hypothesis: Does flexibility of schedule and control over daily work organization make women more likely to engage in self-employment because of their children or do occupation specific characteristics of self-employed women impact fertility? This paper adds to the existing literature by applying parental preferences for a mixed sibling-sex composition to create instrumental variable (IV) estimates for the impact of children on female self-employment. To test the competing hypothesis that occupational choice influences fertility, parent's self-employment experience is applied as an instrument to predict women's likelihood to become self-employed. We find that fertility positively influences women's decision to become self-employed; however, no causal impact of self-employment specific working conditions on female fertility was found. Based on this finding implications for policy and female self-employed are drawn.

The idea that self-employment enables individuals to engage in paid employment and childcare in a more flexible way to balance responsibilities and time allocation is present in the literature for almost three decades (Goffee & Scase, 1983); MacPherson, 1988; Birley, Moss, & Saunders, 1987). It can be expected that women more often face the necessity of flexibility since they continue to carry the bulk of the responsibility, and the division of household labor remains rather traditional despite a convergence of hours worked in the household between men and women (Coltrane, 2000; Bianchi & Casper, 2000). Consequently, the practice of household production is argued to be positively related to self-employment, since this type of employment relationship offers greater flexibility in the organization and the quantity of daily work (Edwards & Field-Hendrey, 2002; Caputo & Dolinsky, 1998; Wellington, 2006). Holtz-Eakin, Joulfaian, and Rosen (1994) offer another possibility by pointing out, that risky ventures might be less superior option if dependent family members are present. This interpretation never gained much support by the data. Both hypotheses emphasize the importance of fertility for occupational choices.

Contrary to these arguments, other scholar argue that certain occupational characteristics influence fertility of women. For example, the entrepreneurship literature has theorized that self-employed may be more fertile in order to increase the likelihood that an inside family member may run the business (Broussard, Chami, & Hess, 2003). Also other social scientists as sociologists and demographers argue that occupation specific characteristics are responsible for fertility differences among women. For example Dinkel (1952) argued almost six decades ago that occupation specific socio-economic status differences relate to women's fertility.

In the empirical literature, entrepreneurship scholars treat the presence of children regularly as exogenous when modeling the decision to work as self-employed and most often observe that the number of children in the home is positively related to women's probability of self-employment (e.g. Boden Jr., 1996; Caputo & Dolinsky, 1998). Not surprisingly, demographers and other social scientists treat occupational choices as an exogenous variable in order to explain fertility or childcare provision (e.g. Gustafsson & Kjulin, 1994;Strand, Wergeland, & Bjerkedal, 1996;Martín García, 2010). This interchangeable theoretical and empirical modeling of self-employment, fertility and childcare provision calls for additional research. Consequently, the endogenous character of fertility and occupational choices complicates research on this topic. As noted by (Parker & Parker, 2009) existing research results need to be treated with caution. However, understanding the relationship between fertility and occupational choice is important for theoretical and practical reasons.

In short, knowing if preferences of caring for children affect women's choice to work as self-employed or if occupation specific working conditions constrain motherhood is important in order to understand women's decision to work as self-employed and allow for adequate policy and managerial implications. This paper studies two competing hypotheses: Do children have a causal influence on women's engagement in self-employment or do specific characteristics of self-employed women and their work environment influence fertility.

This work adds to the existing literature by applying instrumental variable (IV) techniques based on the preferences for a mixed sibling-sex composition and the increasing likelihood of women to engage in self-employment depending on self-employment experience of their parents. Using micro data from several European countries we find evidence that children increase women's likelihood of self-employment compared to dependent employment. Contrary, no causal relationship is found for the possibility that specific working conditions and characteristics of self-employed affect female fertility.

One important stream of literature that relates to the topic of fertility and female self-employment, are studies of motivational gender differences for self-employment. In most studies, these gender related differences in motivations to become self-employed point to the importance of flexibility for female self-employed. For example, (Boden Jr., 1999) studies gender differences in the self-reported reasons why individuals become self-employed using U.S. survey data. His findings suggest that especially women with young children cite flexibility of schedule and family-related reasons more often as reasons to become self-employed in comparison to men. Several other studies found similar results ((Goffee & Scase, 1983); (Scott, 1986); (Chaganti, 1986); (Kaplan, 1988);(Holmquist & Sundin, 1988); (Brush, 1990)). For a relatively homogenous sample of MBA entrepreneurs, (DeMartino & Barbato, 2003) find that motivational differences between female and male entrepreneurs become larger when entrepreneurs are married with dependent children.

These motivational differences for starting a business, combined with a rather traditional division of household labor, suggest that especially women may engage in self-employment in order to organize childcare in a more efficient way. Empirical research on the relation between fertility and self-employment, however, yielded ambiguous results. One of the first studies that showed a positive relationship between fertility and self-employment was (MacPherson, 1988). He reports that additional children in the age group 6-13 years increase likelihood that married U.S. women are self-employed, while the number of children ageing 0-5 has no relationship to self-employment. (Connelly, 1992) finds similar results and points to the importance of self-employed U.S. women that offer childcare services. Furthermore, several other empirical studies find a positive relationship between fertility and self-employment for the U.S. (Wellington, 2006;Edwards & Field-Hendrey, 2002; Lombard, 2001; Caputo & Dolinsky, 1998; Carr, 1996)

Based on longitudinally U.S. data, Boden Jr. (1996) studied transitions from wage to self-employment. Controlling for several individual characteristics, he finds a positive correlation between fertility and selection into self-employment for both, men and women, that is, however, considerably stronger for women.

The positive correlation between fertility and female self-employment has been also documented for several other countries, including Canada (Arai, 2000; Kuhn & Schuetze, 2001), Denmark (Carrasco & Ejrnæs, 2003), Germany (McManus, 2001), and the UK (Cowling & Taylor, 2001). In contrast to these results, a study based on Swedish data reveals that female with young children become less often self-employment (Joona & Wadensjö, 2008).

Also at the aggregate level, fertility and female self-employment are found to be correlated. (Kobeissi, 2010) shows, based on a set of 44 countries, that fertility rates and female self-employment rates are positively related. However, demographers claim the opposite and find a negative relationship based on a panel of 23 OECD countries (Adsera, 2004). Not only does the sign of the relationship differ, but also the direction of putative cause. One central reason behind these conflicting findings may be structural differences of this relationship for developing and developed countries.

Next, studies that link the number of children to self-employment duration offer mixed results as well. Two studies for the U.S. suggest that survival in self-employment is, by trend, not significantly related to number of dependents in the household (Holtz-Eakin et al., 1994). However, Bruce (2002) finds a significant negative relationship using U.S. data. Kuhn and Schuetze (2001) find higher exit rates for female self-employed with older children. Such a result, however, may be still in line with the argument that self-employment allows women to connect childcare and paid employment when children are young; while at older ages of the children switching away from self-employment may become more likely. Another related study analyzes actual time spent for childcare and finds that childcare significantly reduces the duration in self-employment (Williams, 2004).

Additionally recent research has questioned if fertility and female self-employment decisions correlate positively at all because of greater flexibility. For example Gustafsson and Kjulin (1994) and Hildebrand and Williams (2003) regress (self)-employment status on time spend on childcare and find some evidence that self-employed parents spent less time caring for their children. Again, this line of research treats self-employment status as an exogenous variable. With respect to working hours, Hundley (2000) finds that self-employed women with small children allocate significantly less time to their business. However, the actual time allocation tells little about the initial considerations and believes of women and their fertility and labor force participation decisions. This also explains conflicting findings of women's motivations to engage in self-employment found in surveys and the actual time allocation of female self-employed.

In summary, most studies report a positive relationship between fertility and self-employment at the individual level. Such a relation seems to be supported by motivational gender differences for starting a business. At the aggregate country level, the consideration of developed and developing countries seem to influence if fertility and female self-employment rates correlate positively or negatively. Finally, scholars treat occupational choices and fertility interchangeably with respect to the assumed causal relationship. While the entrepreneurship literature tends to treat children as an exogenous variable, demographers and other social scientists treat occupational choices as exogenous.

Methodology and Data 方法和数据

Identification and estimation strategy 识别和估计策略

Applying preferences for mixed sibling sex mix is a well-established strategy in order to identify causal effects of children on labor force participation (Angrist & Evans, 1998). As noted by these authors, the preference for a sex mix of siblings is well documented in the demography literature (Williamson & National Council on Family Relations, 1976). Because of such a preference, parents of same-sex siblings are much more likely to have an additional child. Since sex mix of children is almost random (the probability of giving birth to a male child is 0.51), Angrist & Evans demonstrate that a dummy for whether the sex of the first child matches the sex for the second child is a plausible instrument for further children within the group of women with two children and more. Furthermore, this instrument can be decomposed into two instruments that indicate if the first two children are either either male or female. The estimation of binary dependent variable models with dummy endogenous regressor requires consideration of the discrete character of both, the dependent variable (self-employed vs. non self-employed) and the endogenous regressor (having more than two children). In such a case linear instrumental variable approaches, such as 2SLS is a misspecification of functional form since the orhogonality conditions do not extend to nonlinear transformations (Wooldridge, 2002, 477f). To deal with this problem a bivariate recursive probit estimation is employed. Such a model belongs to the class of simultaneous equation models with dummy endogenous variable. The general specification of the model is

Equation (1) models the decision of being self-employed yi*, where zi is a vector of independent variables, and s1i and s2i are indicators of the sex of the first and second child. The endogenous dummy variable xi* indicates if there are more than two children living in the household. For the More than 2 equation xi*, the parental preference for a mixed sex composition of children is used as an instrument, where γ is the effect of the instrument.

In order to test the competing hypothesis that specific characteristics, preferences and working conditions of self-employed female have a causal impact on fertility, we use self-employment experience of parents as an instrument (i.e. females in the sample are expected to have a higher probability to be self-employed if their parents have worked as self-employed). To be an appropriate instrument we have to assume that women's decision to get a third child is only influenced by the self-employment status of parents via their own occupational choice but not directly. Such an assumption seems to be justifiable when controlling for other potential factors that correlate with parent's self-employment experience and may as well influence their daughter's fertility. Such correlated characteristics are for example parents education, status, or income passed on to the women in our sample. Therefore, we control for parents highest level of education and a dummy variable indicating if parents had responsibility to supervise employees in order to proxy potential income, social status and education differences of the women's parents. The respective equations are

where xi* displays the probability to have a third child and zi is a vector of independent variables (including the same sex variable), and p1i and p2i are indicators of the educational and social status of the women's parents. For the self-employment equation yi, the parents self-employment status is used as an instrument to predict female self-employment decisions, where φ is the effect of the instrument. The recursive model structure only allows testing if children increase women's likelihood to be self-employed versus self-employment increases women's fertility but it does not consider simultaneous causation. A graphical representation is displayed in figure 1.

In order to test if children have a causal affect to choose self-employment over dependent employment or if female engagement in self-employment activity has a causal impact on fertility the data needs to meet high requirements. In order to select a sample that is large enough to apply such a strategy we use data from the European Social Survey, Round I to Round IV (ESS). The ESS is one of the most rigorous cross-country surveys with respect to methodological issues and contains data for several European countries. The sample is limited to countries of the European Union (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Great Britain, Greece, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, and Spain) and the non-EU members Norway and Switzerland. Only female participants are selected that are participating in the labor market for at least 20 hours per week. Further, the identification strategy that is applied demands inclusion of women aging between 18 and 39 years with two or more children. The age restriction is necessary since children may also leave the household, which is not observable in the data used for this study. After dropping observations with missing values, the sample consists of 7527 female labor force participants with at least two children. The average age at first birth is 24 years, nearly 49 percent have two children of the same sex, and 27 percent have more than two children. Around 7.4 percent are self-employed, and surprisingly almost 22 percent of the women report that their parents have self-employment experience (Table A1 in the Appendix). A comparison of group means (Table A2 in the Appendix) reveals that self-employed women in the sample have on average more children, are older, have more education, a higher chance to live with a partner, and a partner that is rather self-employed than depended employed or unemployed. Further, education level of parents of self-employed women is only significantly different at the 10 percent level while there is a significant difference in parent's responsibility for supervising employees when the respondent was 14 years old.

Results 结果

Table 1 presents the results of a bivariate probit estimation based on equation 1 and 2, using same sex siblings as an instrument to analyze the impact of children on female self-employment. For equation 2 we find that same sex instrument is significant and positive. Further age, the partner dummy, the number of other household members, and the dummy variable indicating if parents had responsibility to supervise other employees is significant and positive. Age at first birth and education is significant and negative.

For the control variables in equation 1 we find that, women's probability to be self-employed is positively related to education, self-employment status of the partner, parent's education, and parent's self-employment status. Age is positive but only significant at the 10 percent level. For the main variable of interest, the instrumented More than two dummy, a significantly positive coefficient is observed. This indicates that children have a causal impact to choose self-employment over dependent employment.

Conclusions 结论

This paper aimed to provide causal inference about the relationship between children and women's participation in self-employment. Knowing about the causal relationship is of importance since both, entrepreneurship scholars as well as demographers documented a correlation between the number of children in a household and women's likelihood to be self-employed. However, opposing theoretical reasoning and different interpretations of this relationship makes it difficult to derive proper managerial and policy implications. By making usage of parental preferences for a mixed-sex sibling composition, it is shown that women have a higher likelihood to be self-employed when additional children are present in the household. Contrary, applying self-employment experience of parents as an instrument for women's own self-employment status, no causal influence of such an occupational choice on fertility is observed. These results suggest that flexibility of schedule and control over daily work organization in order to combine childcare and labor force participation are likely to be important motivations for women to engage in self-employment. This has some important implications. First, the causal impact of children on the decision of women to be self-employed suggests, that the desire to combine work and childcare more flexible, results in different start-up motivations and growth aspirations of women compared to men (compare Rosa, Carter, & Hamilton, 1996). Since these motives and aspirations are found to be a key determinant of small business performance (Davidsson, 1991; Wiklund & Shepherd, 2003), the role of children may be important for a set of observed differences in male and female entrepreneurship. Second, our results are helpful to understand information asymmetries between women asking for loans to become self-employed and banks. Prior research points out that women-owned business tend to have lower levels of capitalization and finance (Carter & Rosa, 1998; Haines Jr, Orser, & Riding, 1999). Since female self-employed may have different start-up motives and aspirations because of the desire to connect childcare and paid work, this may cause a market for lemons problem (Akerlof, 1970). I.e. because banks cannot observe if women place higher importance to become self-employed because of the desire to combine childcare and employment (assuming that time devoted to childcare may decrease time devoted to the business and thus its performance), or if they place more importance to create a well performing businesses. (Fay & Williams, 1993) present some experimental evidence of such gender based evaluative criteria. As a consequence the latter may withdraw from choosing self-employment because the discriminative loan conditions do not mirror the differing motives and aspirations of the group of women. Thus, as an implication for female entrepreneurs, it may be of higher importance to communicate and signal their entrepreneurial motivations and aspirations in order to avoid potential discrimination of their environment. For research, an empirical consequence worth studying may be if female entrepreneurs choose to become self-employment at an age that signals lower fertility. Finally, in order to overcome such an adverse selection, policy may try to meet women's demand for flexible jobs in general. If dependent employment offers enough flexibility to combine labor market participation and childcare, women will choose self-employment to lesser extent because of flexibility issues, which will decrease information asymmetries of female entrepreneurs compared to male entrepreneurs. This expectation is in line with the observed country differences - in almost all studies female self-employment and children are positively correlated - for Sweden, a country with strong childcare system, women with young children less often become self-employed than women (Joona & Wadensjö, 2008). For banks, this study suggests that attempts to decrease information asymmetries with respect to women's start-up motivations as well as generating awareness of potential discriminative loan allocation may be beneficial to decrease structural inequalities in gender based evaluation criteria. To women business owner and nascent entrepreneurs communicating motivations may be crucial.

The empirical evidence presented in this paper calls for further research to understand the implications that children have for time allocation patterns, performance and income aspects of self-employed in general and especially for females.

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