Essays on fertility, informal childcare, maternal employment and child health development in China

This thesis contains three chapters exploring the female labour force participation in China. The first chapter investigates how fertility influences female labour force participation; the second chapter investigates how grandparents’ childcare determines mothers’ labour force participation; and the third chapter investigates the relationship between maternal employment in rural China and children’s health development. For each chapter, instruments are selected for the endogenous regressors and instrumental variable estimators are adopted. Results from this thesis show that there is a negative relationship between fertility and female labour force participation in China but grandparents’ providing childcare can increase mothers’ labour force participation, and children in rural China can benefit from their mothers’ off-farm work.