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The sex of the first two children, then, serves as a natural experiment: it is as if an experimenter had randomly assigned some families to have two children and others to have three. The authors were then able to credibly estimate the causal effect of having a third child on labor market outcomes. Angrist and Evans found that childbearing had a greater impact on poor and less educated women than on highly educated women although the earnings impact of having a third child tended to disappear by that child's 13th birthday. They also found that

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