Does Economic Advancement ‘Cause’ a Re-increase in Fertility? An Empirical Analysis for OECD Countries (1960–2007)

Olivier Thévenon and Angela Luci Greulich ()
Additional contact information
Angela Luci Greulich: CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: In the light of the recent reversal of fertility trends in several highly developed countries, we investigate the impact of economic development and its components on fertility in OECD countries from 1960 to 2007. We find that the strong negative correlation between GDP per capita and fertility does no longer hold for high levels of per capita economic output; the relation instead seems to turn into positive from a certain threshold level of economic development on. Survival of an inverse J-shaped association between GDP per capita and fertility is found when controlling for birth postponement, omitted variable bias, non-stationarity and endogeneity. However, gaps between actual and predicted fertility rates show implicitly the importance of factors influencing fertility above and over per capita income. By decomposing GDP per capita into several components, we identify female employment as co-varying factor for the fertility rebound that can be observed in several highly developed countries. Pointing out to important differences with regard to the compatibility between childbearing and female employment, our results suggest that fertility increases are likely to be small if economic development is not accompanied by institutional changes that improve parents' opportunities to combine work and family life.

Keywords: fertility; work life balance; female employment; economic growth; bias; birth; childbearing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-01-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (47)

Published in European Journal of Population, 2014, 30 (2), pp.187-221. ⟨10.1007/s10680-013-9309-2⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Economic Advancement ‘Cause’ a Re-increase in Fertility? An Empirical Analysis for OECD Countries (1960–2007) (2014)
Working Paper: Does Economic Advancement ‘Cause’ a Re-increase in Fertility? An Empirical Analysis for OECD Countries (1960–2007) (2014)
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:hal:journl:hal-00966571

DOI: 10.1007/s10680-013-9309-2

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().