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Journal of Population Economics

, Volume 33, Issue 2, pp 413–440 | Cite as

Birth order and unwanted fertility

  • Wanchuan Lin
  • Juan Pantano
  • Shuqiao SunEmail author
Original Paper

Abstract

An extensive literature documents the effects of birth order on various individual outcomes, with later-born children faring worse than their siblings. However, the potential mechanisms behind these effects remain poorly understood. This paper leverages US data on pregnancy intention to study the role of unwanted fertility in the observed birth order patterns. We document that children higher in the birth order are much more likely to be unwanted, in the sense that they were conceived at a time when the family was not planning to have additional children. Being an unwanted child is associated with negative life cycle outcomes as it implies a disruption in parental plans for optimal human capital investment. We show that the increasing prevalence of unwantedness across birth order explains a substantial part of the documented birth order effects in education and employment. Consistent with this mechanism, we document no birth order effects in families who have more control over their own fertility.

Keywords

Birth order Unwanted births Fertility intentions 

JEL Classification

J13 J22 J24 

Notes

Acknowledgments

We thank Janet Currie, Joe Doyle, Martha Bailey and seminar participants at the University of Michigan for helpful comments. Lin acknowledges research support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.71573004) and the Key Laboratory of Mathematical Economics and Quantitative Finance (Peking University), Ministry of Education. During work on this project, Sun was supported in part by the George Katona Economic Behavior Research Award funded by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. All errors remain our own. The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions.

Funding information

Wanchuan Lin acknowledges research support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.71573004) and the Key Laboratory of Mathematical Economics and Quantitative Finance (Peking University), Ministry of Education. Shuqiao Sun was supported by the George Katona Economic Behavior Research Award, funded by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

Compliance with ethical standards

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Guanghua School of ManagementPeking UniversityBeijingChina
  2. 2.Department of EconomicsStony Brook UniversityStony BrookUSA
  3. 3.Department of EconomicsUniversity of MichiganAnn ArborUSA

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