Did Gender-Bias Matter in the Quantity-Quality Trade-off in 19th Century France?

Claude Diebolt, Tapas Mishra and Faustine Perrin

No 141, Lund Papers in Economic History from Lund University, Department of Economic History

Abstract: Recent theoretical developments of growth models, especially on unified theories of growth, suggest that the child quantity-quality trade-off has been a central element of the transition from Malthusian stagnation to sustained growth. Using an original censusbased dataset, this paper explores the role of gender on the trade-off between education and fertility across 86 French counties during the nineteenth century, as an empirical extension of Diebolt-Perrin (2013). We first test the existence of the child quantity-quality trade-off in 1851. Second, we explore the long-run effect of education on fertility from a gendered approach. Two important results emerge: (i) significant and negative association between education and fertility is found, and (ii) such a relationship is non-unique over the distribution of education/fertility. While our results suggest the existence of a negative and significant effect of the female endowments in human capital on the fertility transition, the effects of negative endowment almost disappear at low level of fertility.

Keywords: Cliometrics; Education; Fertility; Demographic Transition; Unified growth theory; Nineteenth century France (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C22 C26 C32 C36 C81 C82 I20 J13 N01 N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2015-12-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Did Gender-Bias Matter in the Quantity-Quality Trade-off in the 19th Century France? (2015)
Working Paper: Did Gender-Bias Matter in the Quantity- Quality Trade-off in the 19th Century France ? (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:luekhi:0141

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