Selected Fertility and Racial Inequality

Owen Thompson

Journal of Human Resources, 2024, vol. 59, issue 3, 684-710

Abstract: Racial inequality can be affected by changes in race-specific fertility patterns that influence the composition of births, in addition to post-birth factors like schools and labor markets that have been the focus of most prior research. This paper documents a large decline in the fertility of southern African American women after 1964 and argues that these fertility patterns likely led to substantial reductions in racial inequality in the next generation through a selection effect. I first show that the Black–white difference in the general fertility rate fell by approximately 40 percent between 1964 and 1970 among southern women, with no change in racial fertility differences in the North over this period. I also show that these fertility declines were much stronger among socioeconomically disadvantaged southern Black women, for instance, those with eight or fewer years of education and with four or more existing children, which led southern Black children born after 1964 to come from systematically smaller and more educated families. I then directly estimate the association between racial fertility differences and racial differences in the education and earnings of the next generation in a two-way fixed effects framework and find that selective fertility declines were conditionally associated with a reduction in the Black–white education gap of approximately 0.15 years (22 percent) and a reduction in the Black–white earnings gap of approximately six log points (16 percent). These patterns suggest that a substantial share of the Black socioeconomic progress of the 1960s and 1970s was due to selective fertility declines among less advantaged African American women in the South.

JEL-codes: J13 J71 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
Note: DOI: https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.0221-11481R2
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://jhr.uwpress.org/cgi/reprint/59/3/684
A subscription is required to access pdf files. Pay per article is available.

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:uwp:jhriss:v:59:y:2024:i:3:p:684-710

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Human Resources from University of Wisconsin Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().