在家工作思潮對生育率、勞動供給和育兒責任之影響

Abstract

由於 COVID-19 大流行，人們的工作方式受到了巨大影響。具體而言，遠程工作在許多國家變得普遍，證據顯示，某些工作可能會永久採用遠程工作模式。在我們的研究中，我們重點關注遠程工作如何影響美國家庭在生育、勞動供給和配偶之間育兒責任方面的決策。我們提出，遠程工作可以通過兩個途徑影響家庭決策：一是遠程工作時能提供次級育兒服務，二是減少與生育相關的收入損失。通過對家庭部門的定量模型分析，我們得出三個主要結論。首先，育齡期結束時的平均子女數量將從2增加到2.6。其次，性別之間的工作責任差距將擴大，男性承擔的工作責任將更多。由於育兒需求的增加，女性的勞動供給將減少，長期來看，非工作女性的比例將增加7個百分點。最後，在遠程工作普及後，丈夫將承擔更多的育兒責任，但女性仍將承擔更大的育兒負擔。除了對生育、勞動供給和育兒責任的直接影響外，我們還發現女性勞動供給的減少將阻礙女性的人力資本積累，導致23至30歲之間的女性中，最終在對應於低於平均工資水平的人力資本層次中佔比增加5.3個百分點。另一方面，生育率的提高將導致短期內家庭支出增加3%至5%。

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, people's working styles have been greatly impacted. Specifically, remote work has become prevalent in many countries, and evidence shows that remote work could become permanent for some jobs. In our work, we focus on how remote work could affect household decisions regarding childbirth, labor supply, and childcare responsibilities between spouses in the United States. We propose that remote work could affect household decisions through two channels: enabling the provision of secondary childcare while working remotely and reducing the earning penalty associated with childbirth. Through a quantitative model of the household sector, we have three main findings. Firstly, the average number of children at the end of the childbearing years would increase from 2 to 2.6. Secondly, the work responsibility gap between genders would widen, indicating that men bear even more work responsibility. Women will decrease their labor supply due to the increased demand for childcare, and the share of not working women will increase by 7 percentage point in the long run. Lastly, husbands will bear slightly more childcare responsibility after the prevalence of remote work, though women will still bear a much heavier burden of childcare. Despite the direct effects on childbirth, labor supply, and childcare responsibility, we also find that the decrease in labor supply for women will hinder human capital accumulation for women, leading to a 5.3 percentage point increase in the share of women who end up in human capital levels that correspond to earning a wage lower than the average rate for individuals aged between 23 and 30. On the other hand, the increase in childbirth will lead to a 3% to 5% increase in household spending in the short run.