Family Size and Happiness: Evidence From the Twin Birth Instrument
Faculty Mentor(s) Name(s)
Brooke Conaway
Abstract
With declining mental health and fertility rates in the United States, the relationship between having children and happiness has wide-ranging implications. Because parents voluntarily decide how many children to have, identifying a causal relationship between procreation and happiness is challenging. In this paper, we attempt to estimate the exogenous effect of the number of children on parental happiness by employing an Instrumental Variable (IV) regression. As our instrument, we use the quasi-random occurrence of twin births.
Start Date
27-3-2024 1:20 PM
End Date
27-3-2024 1:28 PM
Location
Atkinson 107
Family Size and Happiness: Evidence From the Twin Birth Instrument
Atkinson 107
With declining mental health and fertility rates in the United States, the relationship between having children and happiness has wide-ranging implications. Because parents voluntarily decide how many children to have, identifying a causal relationship between procreation and happiness is challenging. In this paper, we attempt to estimate the exogenous effect of the number of children on parental happiness by employing an Instrumental Variable (IV) regression. As our instrument, we use the quasi-random occurrence of twin births.