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

• metadata
• relations

Document type	Article de périodique (Journal article) – Article de recherche
Access type	Accès restreint
Publication date	2015
Language	Anglais
Journal information	"The American Economic Review" - Vol. 105, no.6, p. 1852-1882 (June 2015)
Peer reviewed	yes
Publisher	American Economic Association
issn	0002-8282
e-issn	0065-812X
Publication status	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
Keywords	Fertility ; Childlessness ; Marriage ; Education ; Structural estimation
Links	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]

See also
	[]