The CajaCanarias – Cabildo de Tenerife Chair of Economics and Mobility at the University of La Laguna is organizing a seminar entitled "Child Sex and Parental Life Satisfaction: Causal Evidence from the Swiss Household Panel" on Thursday, September 10th at 12:00 pm in the Lecture Hall of the Faculty of Economics, Business and Tourism. The seminar will be given by Daniel Hernández, a researcher at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy), where he is completing his doctoral thesis in the field of applied microeconomics using survey data, following his previous work at the Household Survey Unit of the Bank of Spain.

Traditionally, economists have inferred parental preferences regarding the sex of offspring through indirect indicators, such as stopping rules or birth spacing. In Europe, however, declining fertility rates have reduced family size, and with fewer households having three or more children, this behavioral range—on which inferences depend—offers less variability to exploit. Nevertheless, even if the sex of offspring already born does not substantially alter reproductive behavior through new conceptions, it can influence how mothers and fathers evaluate their lives and the degree to which their circumstances align with their ideals (subjective well-being).

This seminar will present causal evidence of the effect of having a daughter (versus a son) on the life satisfaction of mothers and fathers in Switzerland for first and second births, using 25 years of data from the Swiss Household Panel (2000–2024) and exploiting the quasi-random assignment of the baby's sex at birth. Following the second birth, medium-term effects on parental well-being are observed, dependent on the sex of the firstborn and consistent with a preference for mixed-gender families that becomes apparent when the child is old enough to interact with both parents.