Can immigrants help women “have it all”? Immigrant labor and women’s joint fertility and labor supply decisions

Table 1 Descriptive statistics by size of the immigrant population

	Total		Low percent immigrant		High percent immigrant
	Mean	SD	Mean	SD	Mean	SD
Share recently given birth and participating in labor market	0.038	0.015	0.041	0.017	0.035	0.012
Fertility rate	0.064	0.021	0.068	0.023	0.059	0.018
Labor force participation rate	0.832	0.051	0.83	0.051	0.833	0.050
Tetrachoric correlation: fertility and labor force participation	−0.386	0.14	−0.379	0.146	−0.393	0.134
Share working age low-skilled immigrant (LSI)	0.084	0.076	0.028	0.014	0.14	0.071
Log mean income of males with college	10.774	0.478	10.678	0.464	10.872	0.474
Proportion married	0.579	0.134	0.616	0.111	0.542	0.146
Proportion black	0.095	0.064	0.094	0.069	0.096	0.058
Proportion other race	0.021	0.048	0.008	0.009	0.034	0.066
Number of observations	708		478		230

The share recently given birth and participating in the labor market variable is the proportion of women in the cell that have given birth within the previous year and participate in the labor market. The fertility rate is the share of women in the cell who have given birth within the previous year. The tetrachoric correlation is a measure of association between the two binary variables, having recently given birth and participating in the labor market. See the text for further details. Working age refers to ages 18–64, and low-skilled is defined as having at most a high school degree. Given that the sample contains no Hispanics and whites are the omitted category, the share other race variable refers to the share that is non-Hispanic, non-black, and non-white. This group consists mostly of Asians and American Indians. The share of working age immigrant and the log of the mean income of male college graduates variables are calculated within MSA-year cells. All other variables are averages within MSA-year-age group cells. The two age groups in the sample are 22–31 and 32–42. There are 708 MSA-year-age group cells in the sample (118 MSAs, 3 years, and 2 age groups). When computing the statistics in this table, cells are weighted by the share of the population represented by the cell. Of these, 478 are in MSA-years with a low-skilled immigrant share at or below the mean in the sample. The remaining 230 are in MSA-years with immigrant shares above the mean