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> That's just not how people make decisions at that level. If you want a kid you get a kid and you roll with it. You know it's gonna be expensive but you just d
by davidsolomon 6y ago
> That's just not how people make decisions at that level. If you want a kid you get a kid and you roll with it. You know it's gonna be expensive but you just deal.
The way I think about it as that these laws only need to affect some families that are on the margin. Are there some families that are just on the fence and tossing up whether to have a third child? It seems likely to me. As long as this cost is a significant one, it just needs to move the needle for these groups to show up in aggregate effects. Lots of people will make the same choice either way, whether it's to have a third child or not have a third child. Our predictions are for people right on the margin.
>Controlling for income is really really hard since basically everything about lifestyle has some relation to income.
We use county-by-year fixed effects to take out the average effect of birth rates in that county and year, whatever form that variation takes. So if it's just that Cook County in Illinois got richer one year and so had more children, this will be absorbed by the fixed effects, and our car seat impacts are considered relative to this baseline. We also control for birth rates for that number of children and age combination, so we're comparing essentially two families with a six year old and a three year old, but in one state/year they both have to be in car seats, and in the other one only one child has to.
- anitil 6y agoI am one of those people on the margin, and we specifically had a discussion about whether we wanted #3 enough to get a new car or not for exactly this reason. And the cost of these larger cars is relatively significant compared to the old Corolla I have now.