A Substitute for mother

Abstract

I examine the causal relationship between the firstborn child’s sex and the mother’s time spent on home and work responsibilities. Using the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families (KLoWF), the empirical strategy in this paper exploits the randomness of the firstborn child’s sex in a fixed-effect model. I demonstrate that the firstborn daughter (1) lightens the working mother’s domestic responsibilities and (2) offsets the negative impact of additional childbirth on the mother’s working hours. Both findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the firstborn daughter substitutes for the mother in carrying out domestic tasks.