Do Egalitarian Societies Boost Fertility?

Gustav Feichtinger, Alexia Fürnkranz-Prskawetz, Andrea Seidl, Christa Simon and Stefan Wrzaczek

No 1302, VID Working Papers from Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna

Abstract: In general, the spreading of egalitarian family values has often been associated with a decline in fertility. However, recently a rebound in fertility has been observed in several industrialized countries. A possible explanation of this trend may be the spread of egalitarian values that induced institutional changes - such as expansion of child care facilities and father leave – fostering the combination of parenthood and the egalitarian lifestyle. In our paper we build up a formal model to study the diffusion from traditional to egalitarian gender-behavior and its impact on fertility. We find that the long-run development of the total fertility within a population not only depends on the pace of diffusion of egalitarianism and the extent to which social interactions affect the egalitarians’ birth rates, but also on the initial number of traditionalists and egalitarians. We show under which conditions a fertility decline is followed by a subsequent recovery.

Keywords: Egalitarianism; family models; diffusion; fertility. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2013-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-evo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.oeaw.ac.at/fileadmin/subsites/Institut ... Papers/WP2013_02.pdf

Related works:
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:vid:wpaper:1302

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VID Working Papers from Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bernhard Rengs ().