Do Highly Educated Women Choose Smaller Families?

Abstract

Conventional wisdom suggests that in developed countries income and fertility are negatively correlated. We present new evidence that between 2001 and 2009 the cross-sectional relationship between fertility and women's education in the U.S. is U-shaped. At the same time, average hours worked increase monotonically with women's education. This pattern is true for all women and mothers to newborns regardless of marital status. In this paper, we advance the marketization hypothesis for explaining the positive correlation between fertility and female labor supply along the educational gradient. In our model, raising children and home-making require parents' time, which could be substituted by services bought in the market such as babysitting and housekeeping. Highly educated women substitute a significant part of their own time for market services to raise children and run their households, which enables them to have more children and work longer hours.

Selection against variants in the genome associated with educational attainment

“…We postulate that, in addition to being correlated with cognitive ability (32,33), POLY EDU is capturing a portion of the propensity to long-term planning and delayed gratification. To address the question of whether and how these results could be extended to other populations and other time periods it should first be emphasized that the negative selection observed here is likely an example of gene-environment interaction, that is, both the direction of the effect and its magnitude could and would change given a different socioeconomic environment (5,34,35). It is likely that in any population where educational attainment is negatively correlated with fertility the underlying genetic propensity would be in decline, but the actual magnitude and characteristics of the decline could vary substantially.…”

Domestic division of labour and fertility preference in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan

“…Nowadays, countries with greater women's labour market participation tend to be characterised by higher fertility (Brewster and Rindfuss 2000;Esping-Andersen and Billari 2015). On a micro level, the causal link between low fertility and women's labour market participation has never been firmly established (Brewster and Rindfuss 2000) and several new studies document at least a partial reversal in the association between women's employment status and the number of children they have (e.g., Andersson and Scott 2005;Goldscheider, Bernhardt, and Brandén 2013;Hazan and Zoabi 2015).…”

A cohort perspective of the effect of unemployment on fertility

“…From an individual level perspective, other authors have emphasized the emergence of market provided alternatives to household production. For example, Hazan and Zoabi (2014) report the U-shaped pattern of fertility by education levels and attribute it to the capacity to hire external help.…”