Women’s Liberation and the Demographic Transition

Moshe Hazan (), David Weiss and Hosny Zoabi

No 16838, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: U.S. states gave legal and economic rights to married women between 1850 and 1920. Prior to this “women’s liberation,†married women were subject to the laws of coverture, which granted virtually unlimited power to their husbands. Using data from the full count U.S. census and contiguous county-border pairs bordering states that gave rights at different times, we use an event-study analysis to show that rights causally reduced fertility. Thus, women’s rights can help explain the demographic transition, itself one of the most profound societal changes experienced by industrializing countries. Interestingly, women’s rights were not granted retroactively, allowing us to compare people married before and after the reforms. This alternative empirical strategy confirms our findings and illuminates mechanisms. Shifting bargaining power from husband to wife with women’s rights accounts for our results, with the underlying spousal disagreement relating to maternal mortality risk. Women’s empowerment can account for about 20% of the decline in fertility during the demographic transition, and may have relevant implications for policy in today’s developing countries.

JEL-codes: D1 E02 I15 J13 K11 N31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16838 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

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:cpr:ceprdp:16838

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16838

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().