Contraception and the Fertility Transition

Joydeep Bhattacharya and Shankha Chakraborty

Staff General Research Papers Archive from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Dominant paradigms of fertility choice either ignore or assume small, unchanging costof fertility limitation. Inspired by the historical English experience that is contrary to suchassumptions,we modify the Beckerian paradigm to incorporate costly, societal influence oncontraception. In the model economy, heterogeneous, generationally-linked householdschoose between "traditional" and "modern" contraception. The modern has a higher fixedcost (reflecting social opprobrium) but a lower variable cost of averting childbirths. Initially,the rich adopt the modern, and in doing so, unleash a social diffusion process. Eventuallyeveryone switches lowering fertility further and across society. What hastens the switch isthe decline in child mortality. The model is broadly consistent with important features ofthe English transition and has implications for more recent transitions.

Keywords: Child mortality; Fertility; Demographic transition; contraception (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J11 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-10-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo and nep-gro
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/papers/p18182-2014-10-22.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Contraception and the fertility transition (2014)
Working Paper: Contraception and the Fertility Transition (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:isu:genres:38182

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff General Research Papers Archive from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Iowa State University, Dept. of Economics, 260 Heady Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Curtis Balmer ().