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The trade-off between fertility and education: evidence from before the demographic transition

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Abstract

The trade-off between child quantity and quality 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 already in the nineteenth century, exploiting a unique census-based dataset of 334 Prussian counties in 1849. Furthermore, we find that causation between fertility and education runs both ways, based on separate instrumental-variable models that instrument fertility by sex ratios and education by landownership inequality and distance to Wittenberg. Education in 1849 also predicts the fertility transition in 1880–1905.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK

    Sascha O. Becker

  2. Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Poschingerstr. 5, 81679, Munich, Germany

    Francesco Cinnirella & Ludger Woessmann

  3. Department of Economics, University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Ludger Woessmann

Authors
  1. Sascha O. Becker
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  2. Francesco Cinnirella
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  3. Ludger Woessmann
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Correspondence to Sascha O. Becker.

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Becker, S.O., Cinnirella, F. & Woessmann, L. The trade-off between fertility and education: evidence from before the demographic transition. J Econ Growth 15, 177–204 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10887-010-9054-x

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