Abstract
This paper studies the effect of changes in the return to human capital on the fertility–education relationship. The setting is in Anhui Province, China in the thirteenth to twentieth centuries. Over this period, key changes occurred in the civil service examination system, providing a means to test whether incentives for acquiring education influenced fertility decisions. I form an intergenerationally linked dataset from over 43,000 individuals from all social strata to examine the evidence for a child quantity–quality tradeoff. First, as the civil service examination system became more predictable and less discretionary starting in the seventeenth century, raising the return to human capital, I find evidence that households with a lower number of children had a higher chance that one of their sons would participate in the state examinations. This finding is robust to accounting for differences in resources, health, parental human capital, and demographic characteristics. Importantly, the finding is not limited to a small subset of rich households but present in the sample as a whole. Second, the negative relationship between fertility and education disappeared as the lower chance to become an official during the nineteenth century implied a decline in the return to human capital. Taken together, my findings support the hypothesis that fertility choices respond to changes in the return to human capital.
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Notes
World Bank (2014).
As summarized in Esherick and Rankin (1990): “There is a strong tendency for this literature to view state-elite competition as a zero-sum game. The autocratic state seeks full fiscal and coercive power over rural society, while local elites—sometimes representing community interests, sometimes pursuing their own gain—seek to check the state’s intrusion...most of this literature sees order as the product of state control. When elites organize it is a symptom of crisis, conflict, or the disintegration of established order.” See also Hsiao (1960) and Wakeman (1975). Fear of regional clans and military leaders was also the motivation of Sung emperors, who promulgated the civil service examinations in 960; on this point, see Elman (1991).
Although this suggests a greater degree of cooperation and integration between the center and local actors, Beattie’s (1979) study of Tongcheng county shows that families also used income from land holdings, coupled with civil service, in order to maintain status. In other regions, merchants entered elite status and civil service through activities in trade or patronage of the literati lifestyle. See also Naquin and Rawski (1987) for other detailed accounts of local society.
For example, after Newcomen and Watt pioneered the steam engine in eighteenth century Britain, by the 1830s the first railway lines were being constructed in Germany as well as the United States. Between 1825–1850, markets in Europe were much more integrated than they were just 50 years earlier, suggesting that the roots of modernization had taken hold (Shiue and Keller 2007). Printing and the Enlightenment also played a role in the timing of growth in Europe (Mokyr 2012).
Also see Lehr (2009) on the interaction of productivity and demand for human capital.
Fernihough (2011) shows that school enrollment declines with sibship size in early twentieth century Ireland; Klemp and Weisdorf (2012) document that marital fecundity, instrumented by time-until-first-child, is associated with lower literacy of the offspring in reconstitution data for eighteenth and nineteenth century England; Basso (2012) examines the effect of child education on parents’ fertility across early twentieth century Spanish provinces; Murphy (2015) shows that family size is negatively correlated with measures of education across late-nineteenth century French regions; and Diebolt et al. (2015) explore the role of gender in the negative fertility–education relationship in mid-nineteenth century France. Finally, Jun and Lee (2014) examine the relationship between fertility and human capital in South Korea between 1970 and 2010.
For further discussions on social mobility in China during the late imperial era, see Greenhalgh (1988) and Shiue (2017). The use of a civil service examination for government service was also used in Western countries, but only much later. England adopted a government service examination in 1870, and the US in 1883 (Miyazaki 1976, 124).
It is estimated that the actual number of these degrees increased by 20-fold nationally from the late 1500s–1600 (Ho 1962, p. 182).
By about 1650, the only types of hereditary privileges and automatic status that remained belonged to the imperial lineage where the throne was passed from the emperor to one of his sons and the families of the Eight-Banner system. Whereas provinces had regional provincial quotas, the Banner families had a generous “Banner” quota. The latter was an exclusive hereditary institution that dominated military and command functions, and men born into Banner families held a caste-like elite position. Elliot (2001) estimates the total Banner population in the early eighteenth century was 3% of the population of China, mostly in Beijing and Manchuria.
Upwards of 4000 persons appeared for provincial exams at the capital (Twitchett and Mote 1998, p. 36).
For example, in the first metropolitan exam of the Qing dynasty in 1646, the regent asked how the government could bring Manchu and Han officials and people together for a common purpose. This was an important question for the Qing Manchu government that sought to rule over a Han Chinese population. See Twitchett and Mote (1998), Chap. 7, p. 361.
In 1661, maximal quotas for the numbers of eligible candidates per year were 20 for a large prefectural city, 15 for a large and “cultured” county, and 4–5 for a small and “backward” county. Daqinghuidian shili (1899 edition) Chap. 370.
“In all likelihood the fluctuations in the total cumulative number of sheng-yuan in an average lifetime during the first centuries of the Qing period were not very great...All in all, the Qing state succeeded in the main in keeping a stable sheng-yuan quota system.” (Ho 1962, p. 197).
I analyze degree purchase as an alternative strategy below.
Although the imperial government issued decrees that schools be set up in prefectures and counties, in practice, teachers and schools were largely funded through private initiatives organized at the local level. For instance in the year 1078, it was decreed that provinces and prefectures should appoint full-time school teachers, but only 53 counties out of 1000 counties did so (Ho 1962, p. 170). At the start of the Ming (1368–1644) another decree to establish schools was issued, with more compliance (ibid, p. 179).
For basic literacy, parents of even moderate means could pool together tuition fees to hire a local schoolmaster to teach village youngsters basic literacy in return for room and board, meals, and a small allowance (Ebrey 1993, p. 72); other types of support might be had from the lineage (common descent group, or clan). It is estimated that around 30–45% of males and 2% of females were literate in the late Qing (Rawski 1979, p. 23). Over 3 or 4 years, children could learn approximately 1000 characters, which would have been sufficient for reading everyday text and writing business contracts (Leung 1994, p. 393; Ebrey 1993, p. 348).
Specialized schools, and officially subsidized schools, such as the schools specializing in military education or medicine, or national schools that were open to students preparing for state exams, could also be found. Private institutions also flourished—academies such as those established by salt merchants of Guangzhou, for example, were probably among the best schools in the empire (Elman 2002, pp. 403–406).
All three levels of degree holders are included in my empirical analysis.
In comparison, a manual laborer made about 50 taels per year (see Keller et al. 2017).
For example, the official salary of a first-ranked official such as a Grand Secretary was only 180 taels per year (Chang 1962, Tables 1, 16).
The introduction of the printing press might have affected the costs of human capital acquisition (Becker and Woessmann 2009), in addition to diffusing knowledge relevant to merchants (Dittmar 2011). In China, the introduction of movable type printing facilities in the early sixteenth century had arguably limited effects. Ho notes that printed books were still too expensive relative to the means of the large majority of the population, to the point that the introduction of printing in fact increased the hold of high-status families on passing the higher state examinations (Ho 1962, pp. 214–215).
One might think that the return to office might rise with the increase to population size, although as discussed above there is little evidence for this. For evidence that competition was intensifying over the Qing across all regions of China, see Chang (1955), Ho (1962), and Elman (2000, Table 3.4, p. 662).
\(\updelta \) could also be stochastic due to idiosyncratic factors across individuals or over time.
The Tongcheng genealogies are not unique in the length of the period covered; Fei and Liu (1982), for example, examine lineages over the period of 1400–1900.
See Shiue (2016) for additional information.
Co-residence beyond the nuclear household was common practice during the Ming–Qing era. Tax census data for the late eighteenth century suggests the average size of the household was between 5 and 8 persons, where typically grandparents shared a household with their sons and grandchildren (Wang 1974).
In particular, degree purchases are examined in Sect. 5.2.1 below.
That is, this data may not be well suited for analyzing child mortality. Furthermore, each of these men is linked to his father and grandfather to examine the intergenerational transmission of human capital.
I observe about 3600 men who were alive in the year 1790 in my sample. These men had more than 4200 wives, and the data records more than 7500 sons and 4100 daughters, for a total of just under 20,000 persons. Gazetteers were local histories about a certain place. Three county-level gazetteers about Tongcheng cover the period under analysis: Tongcheng xian zhi (1490), Tongcheng xian zhi (1696), Tongcheng xuxiu xian zhi (1827).
I define the variable Brothers as the number of brothers from the same father, but results are similar when I include half-brothers and adopted brothers in the analysis.
Fertility figures should be viewed as lifetime (completed) fertility data.
Studies of fertility in China at times apply a scaling factor to account for any under-recorded births (male and especially female). This would not affect the fertility–education relationship I focus on.
There are 8291 married men during the Qing in the sample. To convert this into a population figure, I assume that 20% of all men did not marry, and that the Qing population was composed of below-age-of-marriage men/women to one-third each. This gives a scaling factor of 3.75: 14 jin-shi/\((8291 \times 3.75) = 0.045\%\).
Note that since optimal child quantity and quality are simultaneously determined, \(\beta _1\) gives the conditional correlation implied by the model, not the causal effect of child quantity on child quality.
Extending this analysis below I allow for more general patterns over time as well as trends that vary across lineages (Table 11), without changing the main results.
In unreported analysis I have also examined the role of lineage differences for these results by dropping one lineage at a time, finding that the results are robust.
I take as Late Qing observations all men with birth year of 1800 or later; this includes a few that were born after the fall of the Qing in 1911. These cases do not drive the result.
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Thanks to the editor, four referees, Sascha Becker, Steve Broadberry, Raquel Fernandez, Avner Greif, Bishnupriya Gupta, Murat Iyigun, Wolfgang Keller, Omer Moav, Tom Rawski, Ted Telford, Michèle Tertilt, and Nathan Sussman, as well as audiences at University of California-Davis, Fudan University, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Mannheim, University of Montreal, McGill, Northwestern, Oxford, Warwick, the Asian Historical Economics Conference, the NBER Development of the American Economy, the NBER Economic Fluctuations and Growth, and the Stanford SITE Conference for useful comments. T. Telford provided data used in this paper. Generous support from the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R03 HD042731-01) is gratefully acknowledged. The paper was partly written while the author was National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, whose hospitality is gratefully acknowledged.
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Appendix
See Tables 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 and Fig. 4.
Quantity–quality relationship in early versus late Qing: nearest-neighbor matching for alternative time breakpoints
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Shiue, C.H. Human capital and fertility in Chinese clans before modern growth. J Econ Growth 22, 351–396 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10887-017-9148-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10887-017-9148-9