We’re excited to welcome Hamish Low to the Vancouver School of Economics for our 2025-26 Stone Inequality Seminar Series. Low will be presenting his paper, titled “Fertility and Family Labor Supply.”
Abstract
We study how fertility decisions interact with labor supply and human capital accumulation of men and women. First, we use longitudinal Danish register data and tax reforms to show that increases in wages of women decrease fertility while increases in wages of men increase fertility. Second, we estimate a life-cycle model to quantify the importance of fertility adjustments for labor supply and long-run gender inequality. Wage elasticities of women are more than 10% lower if fertility cannot be adjusted. Finally, we show that the long-term consequences of human capital depreciation around childbirth in an important driver of the long-run gender wage gap in the model.
Event Details
Date: November 3, 2025
Time: 3:30 – 5:00pm
Location: Iona 533, 6000 Iona Dr, Vancouver, BC
—
Hamish Low is a Senior Economist and Economic Advisor in the microeconomics team in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Prior to joining the Fed, Hamish was the James Meade Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and Nuffield College, and before that, Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge and Trinity College, Cambridge. Hamish is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Hamish holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford, and a Phd in Economics from University College London.
His research agenda sits within the broad fields of Public Economics and Labor Economics, and is focused on understanding the risks that individuals and families face, and the choices that they make (or don’t) to insure themselves. This includes risks that are primarily economic, and those due to health shocks and changes in family structures. A key part of this agenda has been to understand the role of government in mitigating the uncertainty. He has published widely in the top outlets in Economics including Econometrica, the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy.