Fertility and Childlessness in the United States

We develop a theory of fertility, distinguishing its intensive margin from its extensive margin. The deep parameters are identified using facts from the 1990 US Census: (i) fertility of mothers decreases with education; (ii) childlessness exhibits a U-shaped relationship with education; (iii) the relationship between marriage rates and education is hump-shaped for women and increasing for men. We estimate that 2.5 percent of women were childless because of poverty and 8.1 percent because of high opportunity cost of childrearing. Over time, historical trends in total factor productivity and in education led to a U-shaped response in childlessness rates while fertility of mothers decreased

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Type de document	Article de périodique (Journal article) – Article de recherche
Type d'accès	Accès restreint
Année de publication	2015
Langue	Anglais
Information sur le périodique	"The American Economic Review" - Vol. 105, no.6, p. 1852-1882 (June 2015)
Peer reviewed	oui
Editeur	American Economic Association
issn	0002-8282
e-issn	0065-812X
Statut de la publication	Publié
Affiliations	UCL - SSH/LIDAM/CORE - Center for operations research and econometrics UCL - SSH/IACS - Institute of Analysis of Change in Contemporary and Historical Societies
Mots-clés	Fertility ; Childlessness ; Marriage ; Education ; Structural estimation
Liens	http://perso.uclouvain.be/david.delacroix/pdf/dinks-paper.pdf http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/160865[Handle] https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20120926[DOI]

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