Abstract
The interaction between investment in children’s education and parental fertility is crucial in recent theories of the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern economic growth. This paper contributes to the literature on the child quantity–quality trade-off with new county-level evidence for Prussia in 1816, several decades before the demographic transition. We find a significant negative causal effect of education on fertility, which is robust to accounting for spatial autocorrelation. The causal effect of education is identified through exogenous variation in enrollment rates due to differences in landownership inequality. A comparison with estimates for 1849 suggests that the preference for quality relative to quantity might have increased during the first half of the nineteenth century.
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Notes
Recently, Klemp and Weisdorf (2010) estimate the causal effect of fertility on literacy using the Cambridge Group’s demographic data for 26 English parishes for the 17th and 18th century. They identify the causal effect of fertility on literacy using exogenous variation in sibship size due to differences in parental fecundity.
See also Clark (2007) for a controversial evolutionary explanation of why England was the first to industrialize.
The model of Galor and Moav (2002) discusses both genetic and cultural evolution. We do not consider the genetic mechanism given the relatively short time period for which we can perform a comparative analysis, 1816–1849.
Additionally, we drop two observations, namely the counties of Adenau and Stadtkreis Trier, because of implausible low values of the female adult population. Regression results including these two observations are basically identical.
We consider as primary schools both elementary schools (Elementarschulen) and middle schools (Mittelschulen).
This is because technological progress reduces the adaptability of existing human capital to the new technological environment.
A Prussian Morgen was equal to about 0.25 hectares.
Following Becker and Woessmann (2009, 2010), we also used distance to Wittenberg as an alternative instrument for education in 1816, exploiting the fact that Martin Luther had preached his followers to learn to read in order to read the Bible. Results are qualitatively the same when using that instrument. Detailed results are available from the authors on request.
Latitude and longitude are expressed in decimal degrees. We assigned a distance threshold value of one degree which corresponds to approximately 111 km at the equator. The largest minimum distance is 0.90 degrees, which means that if we specify a threshold value smaller than 0.90, there is at least one county with no neighbors. The spatial regression results discussed are robust to different specifications of the distance threshold value.
Detailed results of the tests of spatial dependence are available upon request.
Given the issues related to county border changes for the data on births 1816-21, the spatial analysis considers only the child–woman ratio in 1816 as a dependent variable.
When increasing the distance threshold value, results obtained through OLS and spatial regressions tend to converge.
The ceteris paribus condition includes the assumption that the cost of raising a child (regardless of quality) and the cost of educating a child did not change between 1816 and 1849.
Further evidence in Becker et al. (2010b) suggests that higher female education may have additionally led to reduced fertility in the next generation.
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Comments from two anonymous referees and financial support by the Pact for Research and Innovation of the Leibniz Association are gratefully acknowledged.
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Becker, S.O., Cinnirella, F. & Woessmann, L. The effect of investment in children’s education on fertility in 1816 Prussia. Cliometrica 6, 29–44 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-011-0061-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-011-0061-8