Malthus in the Bedroom: Birth Spacing as a Preventive Check Mechanism in Pre-Modern England

Francesco Cinnirella, Marc Klemp and Jacob Weisdorf

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: The role of demography in long-run economic growth has been subject to increasing attention. This paper questions the received wisdom that marital birth control was absent before the nineteenth century. Using an extensive individual-level dataset covering 270,000 births from 80,000 families we show that higher national and sector-specific real wages reduced spacing between births in England over more than three centuries, from 1540-1850. This effect is present among both poor and rich families and is robust to a wide range of control variables accounting for external factors influencing a couple’s fertility such as malnutrition, climate shocks and the disease environment.

Keywords: Spacing; birth intervals; fertility limitation; natural fertility; preventive check (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/resear ... -2013_cinnirella.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Malthus in the Bedroom: Birth Spacing as a Preventive Check Mechanism in Pre-Modern England (2012)
Working Paper: Malthus in the Bedroom: Birth Spacing as a Preventive Check Mechanism in Pre-Modern England (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:174

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