Data Set for the France Synthetic Control Study on Fertility Rate

The dataset we compiled is used to explore the question: What was the causal effect of the 1994 French Parental Leave Reform on France's total fertility rate (TFR)?

In this repository you will find: a codebook with descriptions of the variables, the dataset in a csv format, and the code used for the analysis.

Codebook

The dataset contains 15 countries including France and takes the form of panel data, each row describing different years. The unit of analysis in this codebook is country. The only unit that has 1 as a treatment variable is France, and it is compared against other OECD countries meeting the donor pool criteria: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, South Korea, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Switzerland.

Variable category	Name	Description	Type	Source
Time	year	Year
Treatment	reform	The 1994 French Parental Leave Reform	Categorical Binary dummy (0=no, 1=yes)	Independent research, OECD Family Database
Outcome	tfr	The total fertility rate (TFR)	Continuous On-average children per mother in her lifetime	The World Bank
Confounders	gdp	Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita	Continuous, Current US dollars	The World Bank
	hdi	The Human Development Index (HDI) score	Continuous, Unitless between 0 (lowest) and 1 (highest)	UNDP
	labor_rate_female and labor_rate_male	Labor participation rate for female and male populations respectively	Continuous, %. Age between 15 and 64	The World Bank
	tertiary_school_enrollment_total	Teritial education school enrollment rate	Continous, %.	The World Bank
	avg_yrs_schooling_total	Average years of schooling	Continuous, Number of years	The World Bank
	life_expectancy	Life expectancy	Continuous, Age (years)	The World Bank
	infant_mortality	Infant mortality rate	Continous, %	The World Bank
	gini	Wealth inequality (Gini coefficient)	Unitless from 0 (lowest) to 100 (highest)	The World Bank

You can also find the Codebook in this Google document here.

Additional comments on the variables

• gdp is GDP per capita
• labor_rate_female is Labor force participation rate, female (% of female population ages 15+) (national estimate) taken from the Worldbank here
• labor_rate_male is Labor force participation rate, males (national estimates) taken from the Worldbank here
• tertiary_school_enrollment_total is School enrollment, tertiary (% gross) taken from the Worldbank here. Gross enrollment ratio is the ratio of total enrollment, regardless of age, to the population of the age group that officially corresponds to the level of education shown. Tertiary education, whether or not to an advanced research qualification, normally requires, as a minimum condition of admission, the successful completion of education at the secondary level.
• avg_yrs_schooling_total (and similarly for avg_yrs_schooling_female) is taken from the Worldbank database here. From the Series choose these two indicators: Barro-Lee: Average years of total schooling, age 25+, female; Barro-Lee: Average years of total schooling, age 25+, total
• life_expectancy is from the Worldbank here
• infant_mortality is Mortality rate, infant (per 1,000 live births) from the Worldbank here. Estimates developed by the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation ( UNICEF, WHO, World Bank, UN DESA)
• gini is from the WIID - World Income Inequality Database, UNU-WIDER, United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research found here