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A. Hanisch:
"Modelling Fertility and Human Capital - A Gender Specific Approach";
Supervisor: A. Fürnkranz-Prskawetz; Institut für Stochastik und Wirtschaftsmathematik - E 105-3, 2016; final examination: 2016-04-22.

Due to the changes in fertility and its familiar circumstances, like the timing of births and
family structures, over the last century, fertility models had to be revised to reproduce and
explain the observed empirical data. One very recent introduced feature in the framework of
fertility models that can be key to analyze the current developments in the society is to assume
gender speci c agents with gender speci c wages, educational choices and tasks in the household.
In this master thesis I will present two papers that focus on these gender speci c aspects in
fertility models. The rst, "A model of voluntary childlessness" by Gobbi (2013), concentrates
on gender speci c agents with speci c fertility choices, the consequential e ects on the matching
process of spouses in the marriage market and as an outcome of this on the number of children.
Furthermore, Gobbi introduces a fertility framework in which it can be an optimal solution for
parents to stay childless, depending on their joint taste for children. Moreover, in her paper
she shows the quite unintuitive result, that, under certain circumstances and assumptions, the
correlation between childlessness and fertility can be positive.
The second paper I present, "Gender Inequality, Endogenous Cultural Norms, and Economic
Development" by Hiller (2014), focuses on the quality instead of the quantity of children.
Hiller introduces the gender speci c aspect by assuming that girls and boys do receive a gender
speci c amount of education during their childhood. He chooses a framework in which parents
always have exactly two children and decide the amount of education they provide to them
dependent on an endogenous social norm of the society, without knowing that their decision
will in
uence the future development of the norm. The social norm is driven by the female
labour force participation, which itself is contingent on the wage and the human capital which
is determined by the gender speci c amount of education girls receive during their childhood.
With his analysis Hiller identi es three di erent states of the society and gives policy advices,
how a society can escape a low productive poverty regime and converge into a high productive
steady state in which gender equality is accomplished.

Endogenous Fertility/Endogenous Human Capital/gender specific