Does Parental Education Affect Fertility? Evidence from Pre-Demographic Transition Prussia

Sascha Becker, Francesco Cinnirella, Ludger Woessmann and Sascha O. Becker
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Sascha O. Becker

No 3430, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: While women's employment opportunities, relative wages, and the child quantity-quality trade-off have been studied as factors underlying historical fertility limitation, the role of parental education has received little attention. We combine Prussian county data from three censuses - 1816, 1849, and 1867 - to estimate the relationship between women's education and their fertility before the demographic transition. Despite controlling for several demand and supply factors, we find a negative residual effect of women's education on fertility. Instrumental-variable estimates, using exogenous variation in women's education driven by differences in landownership inequality, suggest that the effect of women's education on fertility is causal.

Keywords: demographic transition; female education; fertility; nineteenth century Prussia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J24 N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp3430.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Parental Education Affect Fertility? Evidence from Pre-Demographic Transition Prussia (2011)
Working Paper: Does Parental Education Affect Fertility? Evidence from Pre-Demographic Transition Prussia (2011)
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:ces:ceswps:_3430

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().