Robots, Jobs, and Optimal Fertility Timing

This paper investigates the effects of labor automation on fertility timing decisions using European panel data, by constructing a measure of local exposure to industrial robotics, and by adopting a Fixed Effect with Two-Stages Least Squares methodology. Higher exposure is associated with an anticipation of fertility in low- and high-skilled regional labor markets, and with its postponement in medium-skilled ones. An optimal stopping model formalizes the causal intuition, and shows that the effect of an increase in observed automation on the willingness to postpone fertility is concave with respect to education, consistently with the Routine-Biased Technological Change hypothesis