Twins Support the Absence of Parity-Dependent Fertility Control in Pretransition Populations

Gregory Clark, Neil Cummins and Matthew Curtis

Demography, 2020, vol. 57, issue 4, No 16, 1595 pages

Abstract: Abstract A conclusion of the European Fertility Project in 1986 was that pretransition populations mostly displayed natural fertility, where parity-dependent birth control was absent. This conclusion has recently been challenged for England by new empirical results and has also been widely rejected by theorists of long-run economic growth, where pre-industrial fertility control is integral to most models. In this study, we use the accident of twin births to show that for three Western European–derived pre-industrial populations—namely, England (1730–1879), France (1670–1788), and Québec (1621–1835)—we find no evidence for parity-dependent control of marital fertility. If a twin was born in any of these populations, family size increased by 1 compared with families with a singleton birth at the same parity and mother age, with no reduction of subsequent fertility. Numbers of children surviving to age 14 also increased. Twin births also show no differential effect on fertility when they occurred at high parities; this finding is in contrast to populations where fertility is known to have been controlled by at least some families, such as in England, 1900–1949, where a twin birth increased average births per family by significantly less than 1.

Keywords: Fertility; Family planning; Natural fertility; Economic history; Economic growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s13524-020-00898-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Twins support the absence of parity-dependent fertility control in pretransition populations (2020)
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:spr:demogr:v:57:y:2020:i:4:d:10.1007_s13524-020-00898-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13524

DOI: 10.1007/s13524-020-00898-0

Access Statistics for this article

Demography is currently edited by John D. Iceland, Stephen A. Matthews and Jenny Van Hook

More articles in Demography from Springer, Population Association of America (PAA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().