The Long-run Determinants of Fertility: One Century of Demographic Change 1900-1999

Dierk Herzer, Holger Strulik and Sebastian Vollmer

Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät

Abstract: We examine the long-run relationship between fertility, mortality, and income using panel cointegration techniques and the available data for the last century. Our main result is that mortality changes and growth of income per capita account for a major part of the fertility change characterizing the demographic transition. The change of mortality alone, however, is insufficient to explain the secular decline of population growth. For that interaction of mortality and income growth is needed. These results are robust against alternative estimation methods, potential outliers, sample selection, different measures of mortality, and the sample period. In addition, our causality tests suggest that fertility is both endogenous and exogenous. In particular, we find that an increase of fertility reduces growth of income per capita.

Keywords: fertility; mortality; economic development; panel cointegration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 J1 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2010-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://diskussionspapiere.wiwi.uni-hannover.de/pdf_bib/dp-456.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The long-run determinants of fertility: one century of demographic change 1900–1999 (2012)
Working Paper: The Long-run Determinants of Fertility: One Century of Demographic Change 1900-1999 (2010)
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:han:dpaper:dp-456

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Heidrich, Christian ().