The effect of education on overall fertility

Fertility rates have long been falling in many developed countries, while educational attainment in those countries has risen. We attempt to reconcile these two trends with a novel application of two recent models to generate plausibly causal effects of education that can explain these decreases in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of population economics Vol. 36; no. 1; pp. 471 - 503
Main Authors DeCicca, Philip, Krashinsky, Harry
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2023
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Childlessness
Children & youth
Compulsory education
Demography
Developed countries
Earnings
Economics
Economics and Finance
Education
Educational attainment
Fertility
Francophones
Industrialized nations
Labor Economics
Marriage
Original Paper
Population Economics
Social Policy
Trends
Women
Canada
Fertility
Education
J12
Compulsory schooling
Earnings
J13
O10
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Summary:Fertility rates have long been falling in many developed countries, while educational attainment in those countries has risen. We attempt to reconcile these two trends with a novel application of two recent models to generate plausibly causal effects of education that can explain these decreases in fertility. Using Canadian data, we exploit changes in compulsory schooling laws to find that education “compresses” the fertility distribution—women are more likely to have at least one child but less likely to have multiple children. We demonstrate that the mechanism for this effect is the positive impact of education on earnings and marriage.
ISSN:0933-1433
1432-1475
DOI:10.1007/s00148-022-00897-y