Abstract
While womens employment opportunities, relative wages, and the childquantityquality trade-off have been studied as factors underlyinghistorical fertility limitation, the role of womens education hasreceived little attention. We combine Prussian county data from threecensusesu1816, 1849, and 1867uto estimate the relationship betweenwomens education and their fertility before the demographic transition.Despite controlling for several demand and supply factors, we find anegative residual effect of womens education on fertility.Instrumental-variable estimates using educational variation derivingfrom landownership concentration, as well as panel estimates controllingfor fixed effects of counties, suggest that the effect of womenseducation on fertility is causal.
Item Type: | Journal article |
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Faculties: | Economics Economics > Chairs > CESifo-Professorship for Empirical Innovation Economics |
Subjects: | 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics |
Language: | English |
Item ID: | 20263 |
Date Deposited: | 15. Apr 2014, 08:57 |
Last Modified: | 04. Nov 2020, 13:01 |