JC_Tae

This is a well motivated replication of a recent paper by Doepke and Kindermann (2019), who in turn build on Rasul (2008)

Doepke, M., Kindermann, F.(2019). Bargaining over babies: Theory, evidence, and policy implications. American Economic Review 109, 3264–3306.

Since this is a recent paper published in the AER, the survey data and Stata code for empirical analysis and simulation are available.

The paper examines the timing of fertility choices in married households in a bargaining framework. As the authors point out a key mechanism is that:

in a society where the burden of raising children is borne primarily by mothers, women will be more likely than men to disagree with having another child, and ceteris paribus the fertility rate will be lower compared to a society with a more equitable distribution of the costs and benefits of having children

The paper finds that

As predicted by the theory, it is precisely in the countries where men do the least amount of work where the fertility rate is the lowest, and where women are especially likely to be opposed to having another child.

This is a substantial paper so getting to understand all the steps for replication will be a good learning experience.

As Tae points out, the longitudinal dataset from the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) does not include South Korea which is a country with low fertility and where household chore burdens fall substantially upon women. He expresses his interest in exploring and possibly re-calibrating the model to gain insight on this case. How well this can be done will depend on whether he can find comparable data for South Korea.

On this question, it is interesting to note that the dataset does include Japan, a country that shares some similar characteristics. Perhaps it is beyond the scope of this paper and replication, but a possible interesting extension to the model is to think of the pre-marriage game stage. As I understand the model, fertility drops in as women (who may have rising opportunities) push to delay having children, particularly in societies where this will exact a heavy penalty on their lives. But for very similar reasons perhaps women in Japan and South Korea have been also postponing the age of marriage, or avoiding it altogether. As a possible extension, it might be interesting to explore this angle. Of course this is a more difficult issue to study because there's an endogenous household formation decision to model, and couples do not pair at random. But certainly it seems an important part of the issue in these countries. There is an interesting economics literature on matching that could be complementary.

Even if extensions of this sort may be beyond the scope of the project, the 'replication' exercise would be more interesting if you include a section on possible extensions of this kind, and other elements of your thinking about how to use the framework to study issues in South Korea.