The perils of father-reported fertility data for household labour supply models

Abstract

Many panel data-sets contain father-reported fertility data. Yet, since men tend to underreport past fertility—especially daughters or children from previous marriages—using such data can lead to significantly biased results when estimating household labour supply models. For example, when analysing fertility data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has a significant retrospective component, fathers’ labour supply appears more responsive to the births of sons than to daughters (Lundberg and Rose, Review of Economics and Statistics 84(2): 251–268, 2002). However, no evidence for this differential can be found in a much larger sample of Current Population Survey data from the same population. It is important for researchers to consider the provenance of data on fertility variables and to undertake robustness checks with data reported by women whenever possible.

Keywords:

• panel data
• fixed-effects models
• bias
• fertility surveys
• fathers
• daughters
• labour supply
• data quality

Notes

1. James P. Vere is at the School of Economics and Finance, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong. E-mail: [email protected]

2. The research in this paper was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. HKU7234/04H). I am grateful to James Yetman, Brett Norwood, and three anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions.