Three Essays on Fertility, Import Competition, and Meta-Analysis

The current work relies on G-SOEP to study the effects of import competition on fertility choices. This phenomenon has been addressed by using a single-observation dataset following the seminal paper of Autor et al. (2014). The results show a negative and significant effect on the choice of childbearing.Moreover, the trade exposure measure has been computed by aggregating the Lander and, in a second moment, the industry sector. Since there may be some simultaneous factors (time-varying), which does not depend on import competition, we consider the panel data for the same observations over period 1999-2019; the analysis comprehends also the presence of the male partner in order to study the phenomenon of the Added Worker Effect (AWE). Unfortunately, no significant estimation can be displayed except for the interaction between trade exposure aggregated by sector and "Living in the East of Germany". The last part of this contribution takes into consideration three meta-analyses in order to study cultural values through the implementation of Individualism as the main indicator in place of the country-level variables in experimental settings.