Censorship, Family Planning, and the Historical Fertility Transition

Brian Beach and W Hanlon

No 25752, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The historical fertility transition is one of the most important events in economic history. This study provides new evidence on the role that ideas about family planning played in this transition. We begin by documenting a link between the famous Bradlaugh-Besant trial that took place in England in 1877, which revolved around the morality of family planning, and the sharp decline in fertility that took place in Britain beginning in that year. We then show that similar declines are observed among populations living outside of Britain but with strong cultural and linguistic links to Britain. Our findings highlight the importance of changing social norms in the historical fertility transition and provide novel evidence showing that cultural and linguistic ties can play an important role in rapidly transmitting social change around the world.

JEL-codes: J1 N31 N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro, nep-his and nep-soc
Note: CH DAE DEV
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25752.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:25752

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25752

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().