The Personal Tax Exemption and Married Women`s Birth Spacing in the United States

Abstract

In this article, several specifications of the piecewise-linear segment hazard rate model with exponential distribution are estimated to investigate the effect of the personal tax exemption (PTE) on married women’s birth spacing. Using a sample collected from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the estimation results from the hazard rate model confirm that married couples with a high PTE tend to shorten the length of the second and third birth intervals. Furthermore, the hazard rate increases until four years after the preceding birth and then decreases in the case of the third birth, although this is not so for the second birth.