Michele Federle

Take-up of egg freezing—the cryopreservation of oocytes for later use—has risen sharply across high-income countries, yet remains concentrated among the most educated and highest-earning women. I study how access to this technology reshapes fertility and human capital accumulation over the life cycle. I embed an endogenous egg-freezing choice into a workhorse life-cycle model of female labor supply and fertility, in which women differ in labor productivity according to a fixed education type. The model's central tension is a conflict between children and on-the-job human capital: childbearing pulls women out of the labor market precisely when returns to experience are steepest. Egg freezing relaxes this conflict at a price, trading high upfront retrieval costs for the option to delay childbearing without forgoing biological motherhood. I discipline the technology's biology using the clinical literature, summarizing quantity and quality components of retrieved eggs into an “effective-egg” index of cumulative live-birth probability. In counterfactuals that make egg freezing informationally available to all women—each of whom freezes only when individually optimal—both human capital and completed fertility rise, relative to a world without the technology.