The Trade-off between Fertility and Education: Evidence from before the Demographic Transition

Sascha O. Becker (), Francesco Cinnirella () and Ludger Woessmann ()

No CESifo Working Paper No. 2775, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Group Munich

Abstract: The trade-off between child quantity and education is a crucial ingredient of unified growth models that explain the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. We present first evidence that such a trade-off indeed existed before the demographic transition, exploiting a unique census-based dataset of 334 Prussian counties in 1849. Estimating two separate instrumental-variable models that instrument education by landownership inequality and distance to Wittenberg and fertility by previous-generation fertility and sex-imbalance ratio, we find that causation between fertility and education runs both ways. Furthermore, education in 1849 predicts the fertility transition in 1880-1905.

Keywords: schooling; fertility transition; unified growth theory; 19th-century Prussia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J13 N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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Working Paper: The Trade-off between Fertility and Education: Evidence from before the Demographic Transition (2009)
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