Research program : Fertility Choices
In all species, when available resources are more abundant, reproduction increases. This was also true for the human species before the industrial revolution. This relationship has changed in the recent past. During the last two centuries, as economies grew richer, people had fewer children. This phenomenon is known as the demographic transition (see e.g. Caldwell's and Chesnais' books). Now, both within and across countries, the rich and the educated have fewer children than the poor and the unskilled. Economists do not believe that a significant part of observed fertility is mostly involuntary, and would not have materialized if contraception were available. Economists model the incentives faced by parents to have many or few children.
Demographers and economists largely disagree on the reasons of the fertility decline over the last two centuries. In the following slides, prepared for a conference in Belo Horizonte, I try to convince that fertility responds to economic incentives, and that it matters.
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Slides.
Marriage, Fertility and Childlessness
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The authors:
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In this research, we study the increasing discrepancy between marriage and motherhood. We distinguish explicitly the decision to have children or not from the choice of the number of children. This distinction turned out to be highlighting, both in terms of data and theory. The main highlight from the theory is to identify several "regimes" and the conditions under which these regimes will prevail. The two involuntary childlessness regimes appear for women with low education and low non labor income, either single or married; we estimate that they account for 5% of American women. In the "eat and procreate" regime, the income of the woman is not high enough for her to be fit to procreate, but it is optimal for her husband to abandon part of his consumption in order to be able to produce children within the couple. In the voluntary childlessness regime, highly educated women do not have children because of their high opportunity cost. |
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Links:
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DINKS, DEWKS & Co.
Marriage, Fertility and Childlessness in the US [with
T. Baudin and P. Gobbi] - Slides.
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Homepage of Thomas Baudin
Differential fertility
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With Matthias Doepke, we emphasize that parents face a trade-off between having many children versus spending large resources on the health and education of each of them. This approach, first developed by Becker, is particularly successful to explain fertility differences as a function of the social class of the parents. Educated parents, for whom time is highly valuable on the labor market, will optimally choose to have few children but spend more resources on their education and health. This model predicts how the size and the composition of population would change in the future through their interaction with the economic and natural environment. Population dynamics, but also population composition, are essential for the development of poor countries and the future of the Earth. |
Poor parents have many children and invest little in education compared to rich parents. This holds within countries and across them.
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De la Croix and Doepke (2003) show that differential fertility accounts for most of the empirical relationship between inequality and growth. Poor parents decide to have many children and invest little in education. A mean-preserving spread in the income distribution increases the fertility differential between the rich and the poor, which implies that more weight gets placed on families who provide little education. Consequently, an increase in inequality lowers average education and, therefore, growth. |
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Policy implications are drawn in a second and third paper: Public education can help to promote growth by reducing differential fertility (De la Croix and Doepke 2004). When private and public education coexist (De la Croix and Doepke 2009), high social class families choose more often private education compared to low social class families. In our 2009 study, we ask why different societies make different choices regarding the mix of private and public schooling. We show that in a given political environment, high income inequality leads to more private education, as rich people opt out of the public system. More private education, in turn, results in an improved quality of public education, because public spending can be concentrated on fewer students. Comparing across political systems, we find that concentration of political power can lead to multiple equilibria in the determination of public education spending. The main predictions of the theory are consistent with state-level and micro data from the United States as well as cross-country evidence from the PISA study. |
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Links:
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To Segregate or to Integrate: Education Politics and Democracy, Review of Economic Studies, 76, 597-628, 2009 [with M. Doepke].
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Data for Table 1,
Data for Tables 2 and 3,
Data for Figure 3,
Data for Table 5 and Figure 4,
Data for Appendix B. - Slides.
- Politics and the structure of education funding, VOX, (with M. Doepke)
- Inequality and growth: why differential fertility matters, American Economic Review,93, 1091-1113, 2003 [with M. Doepke]
- Data of Section IV.
- Slides of the AER article.
- Public versus private education when differential fertility matters, Journal of Development Economics, 73, 607-629, 2004 [with M. Doepke]
- Homepage of Matthias Doepke
Population Policy
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We explore the implications of setting up a system of tradable procreation entitlements to control population in a context of differential fertility, both domestically and at the global level. One of the first tradable rights proposal was made by Boulding in the context of population control in 1964. We generalize his framework with both tradable procreation allowances and tradable procreation exemptions, in order to tackle both over- and under-population problems. As far as human capital is concerned, natalist policy worsens the average education level of the next generation, while population control enhances it. The implications of procreation rights for income inequality and education are contrasted. Our exploratory analysis suggests that procreation entitlements offer a promising tool to control population without necessarily leading to problematic distributive impact, especially at the global level. Moreover, if procreation rights are granted to countries in proportion to existing fertility levels (grandfathering) instead of being allocated equally, population control can be made even more redistributive. |
Axel Gosseries works in applied philosophy at the Hoover Chair. |
Links:
- Population Policy through Tradable Procreation Entitlements, International Economic Review, 50, 507-542, 2009 [with A. Gosseries].
- Slides of the above article.
- Procreation, Migration, and Tradable Quotas, in Population Aging, Intergenerational Transfers and the Macroeconomy, R. Clark, A.Mason and N. Ogawa eds, Edward Elgar Publishing, 227-249, 2007. [with A. Gosseries].
- Homepage of Axel Gosseries
In the following paper, we consider the effect of an environmental tax. As a tax on output would affect the wages, and hence, the opportunity cost of children, households would reallocate their time towards non market activities, such as leisure and reproduction. As reproduction today generates pollution tomorrow, the problem will be even worse in the future. Population will tend to increase and production per capita to decrease as generations pass. The conclusion of the endogenous fertility model would therefore be that capping emissions will gradually leads to larger and poorer successive generations.
Links:
- The Natalist Bias of Pollution Control, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2012 [with A. Gosseries]
- Slides of the above article.
- Homepage of Axel Gosseries
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