Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Key forces behind the decline of fertility: lessons from childlessness in Rouen before the industrial revolution

Key forces behind the decline of fertility: lessons from childlessness in Rouen before the... To better understand the forces underlying fertility decisions, we look at the forerunners of fertility decline. In Rouen, France, completed fertility dropped between 1640 and 1792 from 7.4 to 4.2 children. We review possible explanations and keep only three: increases in materialism, in women’s empowerment, and in returns to education. The methodology is one of analytic narrative, bringing together descriptive evidence with a theoretical model. We accordingly propose a theory showing that we can discriminate between these explanations by looking at childlessness and its social gradient. An increase in materialism or, under certain conditions, in women’s empowerment, leads to an increase in childlessness, while an increase in the return to education leads to a decrease in childlessness. Looking at the Rouen data, childlessness was clearly on the rise, from 4% in 1640 to 10% at the end of the eighteenth century, which appears to discredit the explanation based on increasing returns to education, at least for this period. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Cliometrica Springer Journals

Key forces behind the decline of fertility: lessons from childlessness in Rouen before the industrial revolution

Brée, Sandra; de la Croix, David
Cliometrica , Volume 13 (1) – Sep 8, 2017
Download PDF
30 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/key-forces-behind-the-decline-of-fertility-lessons-from-childlessness-7KkDAek7Jj

References (116)

Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany
Subject
Economics; Economic Theory/Quantitative Economics/Mathematical Methods; History, general; Econometrics; History of Economic Thought/Methodology; Statistics for Business, Management, Economics, Finance, Insurance
ISSN
1863-2505
eISSN
1863-2513
DOI
10.1007/s11698-017-0166-9
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

To better understand the forces underlying fertility decisions, we look at the forerunners of fertility decline. In Rouen, France, completed fertility dropped between 1640 and 1792 from 7.4 to 4.2 children. We review possible explanations and keep only three: increases in materialism, in women’s empowerment, and in returns to education. The methodology is one of analytic narrative, bringing together descriptive evidence with a theoretical model. We accordingly propose a theory showing that we can discriminate between these explanations by looking at childlessness and its social gradient. An increase in materialism or, under certain conditions, in women’s empowerment, leads to an increase in childlessness, while an increase in the return to education leads to a decrease in childlessness. Looking at the Rouen data, childlessness was clearly on the rise, from 4% in 1640 to 10% at the end of the eighteenth century, which appears to discredit the explanation based on increasing returns to education, at least for this period.

Journal

Cliometrica – Springer Journals

Published: Sep 8, 2017

There are no references for this article.