The trade-off between fertility and education: Evidence from before the demographic transition

Becker, Sascha O.; Cinnirella, Francesco und Wößmann, Ludger (2009): The trade-off between fertility and education: Evidence from before the demographic transition. CESifo Working Paper,

Abstract

The trade-off between child quantity and education is a crucial ingredient of unified growth models that explain the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. We present first evidence that such a trade-off indeed existed before the demographic transition, exploiting a unique census-based dataset of 334 Prussian counties in 1849. Estimating two separate instrumental-variable models that instrument education by landownership inequality and distance to Wittenberg and fertility by previous-generation fertility and sex-imbalance ratio, we find that causation between fertility and education runs both ways. Furthermore, education in 1849 predicts the fertility transition in 1880-1905.

• Item Type: Paper
• Faculties: Economics; Economics > Chairs > CESifo-Professorship for Empirical Innovation Economics
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics
• JEL Classification: I20, J13, N33
• Language: English