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Parental Education and Fertility: An Empirical Investigation Based on Evidence from Taiwan

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Abstract

This paper investigated the size of the impact of parental education on fertility choice and whether this effect was larger for maternal education. This paper utilized the substantial expansion of educational opportunities in Taiwan and thus applied the two-stage least-square method to account for the endogeneity of educational attainment. The results showed that parental education was an important factor in reducing the fertility rate. In addition, maternal education was a stronger determinant than paternal education.

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Notes

  1. Bledsoe et al. (1999) surveyed a large number of existing studies and examined the links between female education and fertility. They concluded the negative relationship between female education and fertility might result from omitted variables that potentially affected both education and fertility decisions. .

  2. From 1985, the total fertility rate in Taiwan fell below the replacement level 2.1 children per woman and has kept decreasing to 1.07 in 2013.

  3. The percentage of elderly population (aged over 65) in total population increased from 10 to 20 % takes 21 years in Taiwan. It is much faster than 24 years in Japan, 48 years in Finland, 54 years in Germany, 61 years in Denmark and 85 years in Sweden (source: Council for Economic Planning And Development, Taiwan).

  4. More detail description in “Background” section.

  5. See Chou et al. (2010) for a detailed description of the 1968 education reform in Taiwan.

  6. The gross enrollment rate at the tertiary level was only 15.4 % (Fig. 2).

  7. Comparing to males, the ratios for females are high in recent years. It has happened not only in Taiwan but in the world (UNESCO, Institute for Statistics). There is growing literature discussing this phenomenon (Becker et al. 2010; Goldin et al. 2006). This issue is still worth for the future study.

  8. The number of births stayed around 320,000 since 1986. Since 1998, it dropped to 270,000 and kept decreasing to 200,000 in 2013.

  9. Both gross enrollment rate at tertiary level and percentage of upper secondary graduates entering advanced level showed that there were no clear upward trends from 1976 to 1988. However, an upward trend exactly following the enactment of the policy, 1988, was showed. Hence, the 1987 cut-off is proper for the analysis.

  10. The percentage of sample belonging to the treatment group (mothers), \(T_{mt}\), is 23.95 %. It implies that the percentage of the instruments, \(T_{mt} \times U_{mt}\) and \(T_{ft} \times U_{ft}\), being the same is 76.05 %.

  11. In the sample, there is a large share (80.48 %) of households where the husband is older than his wife.

  12. Equation (2) will provide more information on the relative magnitude of the effects of maternal and paternal education on fertility. Hence, the testing of comparison between 2SLS results in Table 5 would not be provided since there may be potential bias.

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Correspondence to I-Chun Chen.

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The data analyzed in this paper were collected by the “Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan, Taiwan”. The Center for Survey Research of Academia Sinica is responsible for the data distribution. I appreciate the assistance in providing data by the institutes and individuals aforementioned. The views expressed herein are my own.

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Chen, IC. Parental Education and Fertility: An Empirical Investigation Based on Evidence from Taiwan. J Fam Econ Iss 37, 272–284 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-015-9448-1

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