Contraception and the fertility transition

Joydeep Bhattacharya and Shankha Chakraborty

ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Dominant paradigms of fertility choice either ignore or assume small, unchanging cost of fertility limitation. Inspired by the historical English experience that is contrary to such assumptions, we modify the Beckerian paradigm to incorporate costly, societal influence on contraception. In the model economy, heterogeneous, generationally-linked households choose between “traditional” and “modern” contraception. The modern has a higher fixed cost (reflecting social opprobrium) but a lower variable cost of averting childbirths. Initially, the rich adopt the modern, and in doing so, unleash a social diffusion process. Eventually everyone switches lowering fertility further and across society. What hastens the switch is the decline in child mortality. The model is broadly consistent with important features of the English transition and has implications for more recent transitions.

Date: 2014-10-22
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstre ... 60a32e7dc92b/content
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Working Paper: Contraception and the Fertility Transition (2014)
Working Paper: Contraception and the Fertility Transition (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:isu:genstf:201410220700001028

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Iowa State University, Dept. of Economics, 260 Heady Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Curtis Balmer ().