Download This PaperThe Baby Boom and Baby Bust
Economie D'avant Garde, Research Report No. 1
53 Pages Posted: 19 Aug 2002
Date Written: August 2002
Abstract
What caused the baby boom? And, can it be explained within the context of the secular decline in fertility that has occurred over the last 200 years? The hypothesis is that:
(i) The secular decline in fertility is due to the relentless rise in real wages that increased the opportunity cost of having children.
(ii) The baby boom is explained by an atypical burst of technological progress in the household sector that occurred in the middle of the last century. This lowered the cost of having children.
A model is developed in an attempt to account, quantitatively, for both the baby boom and bust.
Keywords: Baby boom, baby bust, fertility, household production, technological progress
JEL Classification: E1, J1, N3, 03
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
By Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri, ...
-
Engines of Liberation - Additional Notes
By Jeremy Greenwood and Ananth Seshadri
-
Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time Over Five Decades
By Erik Hurst and Mark Aguiar
-
Homework in Development Economics: Household Production and the Wealth of Nations
By Randall Wright, Richard Rogerson, ...
-
Labor Supply Shifts and Economic Fluctuations
By Yongsung Chang and Frank Schorfheide
-
Culture as Learning: The Evolution of Female Labor Force Participation Over a Century
-
By Valerie A. Ramey and Neville Francis