Structural Change and the Fertility Transition

Abstract This paper provides new insights into the relationship between structural change and the fertility transition. We exploit the spread of an agricultural pest in the American South in the 1890s as plausibly exogenous variation in agricultural production to establish a causal link between earnings opportunities in agriculture and fertility. Households staying in agriculture reduced fertility because children are a normal good, while households switching to manufacturing reduced fertility because of the higher opportunity costs of raising children. The lower earnings opportunities in agriculture also decreased the value of child labor, which increased schooling, consistent with a quantity-quality model of fertility.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Review of Economics and Statistics

• Publication date

  2019-03-01

• Fields of study

  Agricultural and Food Sciences, Economics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1162/rest_a_00851
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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