More Schooling, More Children

Margherita Fort, Nicole Schneeweis and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer
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Nicole Schneeweis: Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

No 281, Economics Series from Institute for Advanced Studies

Abstract: We study the relationship between education and fertility, exploiting compulsory schooling reforms in Europe as source of exogenous variation in education. Using data from 8 European countries, we assess the causal effect of education on the number of biological kids and the incidence of childlessness. We find that more education causes a substantial decrease in childlessness and an increase in the average number of children per woman. Our findings are robust to a number of falsification checks and we can provide complementary empirical evidence on the mechanisms leading to these surprising results.

Keywords: Instrumental variables; education; fertility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2011-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dem, nep-edu, nep-eur and nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (53)

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https://irihs.ihs.ac.at/id/eprint/2107 First version, 2011 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ihs:ihsesp:281

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