EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

GARY BECKER ON THE QUANTITY AND QUALITY OF CHILDREN

Matthias Doepke

Journal of Demographic Economics, 2015, vol. 81, issue 1, 59-66

Abstract: Before Gary Becker, fertility choice was widely considered to be outside the realm of economic analysis. Apart from intellectual tradition, one reason for this was that the data on fertility did not immediately suggest an economic mechanism. In industrialized countries, fertility had declined strongly over time, even though family incomes were rising. Similarly, in many studies using cross-sectional data the relationship between family income and fertility had been shown to be either flat or declining. To many observers, these observations suggested that the “taste” for children had waned over time and that high income families placed less value on childbearing than the poor.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Gary Becker on the Quantity and Quality of Children (2015) Downloads
Working Paper: Gary Becker on the Quantity and Quality of Children (2014) Downloads
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:cup:demeco:v:81:y:2015:i:1:p:59-66_9

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Demographic Economics from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:cup:demeco:v:81:y:2015:i:1:p:59-66_9