Working Paper: NBER ID: w27668
Authors: Michael R. Haines; J. David Hacker; Matthew S. Jaremski
Abstract: The U.S. fertility transition in the nineteenth century is unusual. Not only did it start from a very high fertility level and very early in the nation’s development, but it also took place long before the nation’s mortality transition, industrialization, and urbanization. This paper assembles new county-level, household-level, and individual-level data, including new complete-count IPUMS microdata databases of the 1830-1880 censuses, to evaluate different theories for the nineteenth-century American fertility transition. We construct cross-sectional models of net fertility for currently-married white couples in census years 1830-1880 and test the results with subset of couples linked between the 1850-1860 and 1860-1870 censuses. We find evidence of marital fertility control consistent with hypotheses as early as 1830. The results indicate support for several different but complementary theories of the early U.S. fertility decline, including the land availability, conventional structuralist, ideational, child demand/quality-quantity trade-off, and life-cycle savings theories.
Keywords: fertility transition; demographic transition; marital fertility; historical demography; census microdata
JEL Codes: J13; N21; N31
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| marital fertility control (J12) | number of live births (J11) |
| literacy (G53) | number of live births (J11) |
| presence of banks (G21) | net marital fertility (J19) |
| urbanization (R11) | number of live births (J11) |
| occupational structure (J21) | number of live births (J11) |
| education (I29) | number of live births (J11) |
| nativity (Y20) | number of live births (J11) |
| church denominations (Z12) | number of live births (J11) |