Are Children “Normal”?
Dan Black,
Natalia Kolesnikova,
Seth G. Sanders and
Lowell Taylor
Additional contact information
Natalia Kolesnikova: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and nowat the University of Mississippi
Seth G. Sanders: Duke University
The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2013, vol. 95, issue 1, 21-33
Abstract:
We examine Becker's (1960) contention that children are “normal.” For the cross-section of non-Hispanic white married couples in the United States, we show that when we restrict comparisons to similarly educated women living in similarly expensive locations, completed fertility is positively correlated with the husband's income. The empirical evidence is consistent with children being “normal.” In an effort to show causal effects, we analyze the localized impact on fertility of the mid-1970s' increase in world energy prices, an exogenous shock that substantially increased men's incomes in the Appalachian coal-mining region. Empirical evidence for that population indicates that fertility increases with men's income. © 2013 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Keywords: economics of fertility; location choice; Appalachian fertility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00257 link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
Working Paper: Are Children “Normal”? (2011) 
Working Paper: Are children 'normal'? (2009) 
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:tpr:restat:v:95:y:2013:i:1:p:21-33
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535
Access Statistics for this article
The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu
More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().