Fertility: The Role of Culture and Family Experience

Working Paper: NBER ID: w11569

Authors: Raquel Fernández; Alessandra Fogli

Abstract: This paper attempts to disentangle the direct effects of experience from those of culture in determining fertility. We use the GSS to examine the fertility of women born in the US but from different ethnic backgrounds. We take lagged values of the total fertility rate in the woman's country of ancestry as the cultural proxy and use the woman's number of siblings to capture her direct family experience. We find that both variables are significant determinants of fertility, even after controlling for several individual and family-level characteristics.

Keywords: No keywords provided

JEL Codes: J13; J16; Z10


Causal Claims Network Graph

Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.


Causal Claims

CauseEffect
TFR in the country of ancestry (F22)woman's fertility (J13)
number of siblings (J12)woman's fertility (J13)
TFR in the country of ancestry (F22)number of children (J13)
number of siblings (J12)number of children (J13)

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