The Trade-off between Fertility and Education: Evidence from before the Demographic Transition
39 Pages Posted: 21 Sep 2009
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The Trade-off between Fertility and Education: Evidence from before the Demographic Transition
The Trade-Off between Fertility and Education: Evidence from Before the Demographic Transition
Date Written: September 2009
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.
Keywords: schooling, fertility transition, unified growth theory, 19th-century Prussia
JEL Classification: I20, J13, N33
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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