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 10% increase in births. 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 formalize this intuition in a theoretical model where a rise in flexibility increases a woman’s time budget and boosts the fertility of higher earning women. The increase in work flexibility under Covid-19 lockdown allowed high-earning women in inflexible jobs to alleviate the career-family trade-off.