The impact of flexibility at work on fertility

Leveraging the first Covid-19 lockdown in Norway as a laboratory for an increase in work flexibility, we uncover a significant and persistent increase in births nine months later. Using the Goldin (2014) measure of work flexibility based on occupation characteristics, we show that fertility increases were concentrated among women in “greedy jobs” with lower flexibility prior to lockdown. We formalise and develop the intuition of Goldin (2014) in a theoretical model where greedy work and greedy children place similar demands on a woman’s time. The model explains the mechanism by which an increase in flexibility boosts the fertility of higher earning women, and shows it unfolds under relatively simple theoretical assumptions. The increase in work flexibility under Covid-19 lockdown allowed high-earning women in greedy jobs to alleviate the career-family trade-off.