Maternal health and the baby boom

Abstract

Fertility in the United States rose from a low of 2.27 children for women born in 1908 to a peak of 3.21 children for women born in 1932. It dropped to a new low of 1.74 children for women born in 1949, before stabilizing for subsequent cohorts. We propose a novel explanation for this boom–bust pattern, linking it to the huge improvements in maternal health that started in the mid‐1930s. Our hypothesis is that the improvements in maternal health contributed to the mid‐twentieth century baby boom and generated a rise in women's human capital, ultimately leading to a decline in desired fertility for subsequent cohorts. To examine this link empirically, we exploit the large cross‐state variation in the magnitude of the decline in pregnancy‐related mortality and the differential exposure by cohort. We find that the decline in maternal mortality is associated with a rise in fertility for women born between 1921 and 1940, with a rise in college and high school graduation rates for women born in 1933–1950 relative to previous cohorts, and with a decline in fertility for women born in 1941–1950 relative to those born in 1921–1940. The analysis provides new insights on the determinants of fertility in the United States and other countries that experienced similar improvements in maternal health.

A prelude to the dual provider family – The changing role of female labor force participation and occupational field on fertility outcomes during the baby boom in Sweden 1900–60

“…On the matter of how these results fit with more general theoretical explanations for the mid twentieth century baby boom that have been proposed over the years, such as: crowding out of younger women from the labor market (Bellou & Cardia, 2014;Doepke, Hazan, & Maoz, 2015), improved maternal health (Albanesi & Olivetti, 2014), technological progress in the household sector (Greenwood, Seshadri, & Vandenbroucke, 2005) and more generally the sustained economic recovery and high levels of economic growth that prevailed in the West after the severe downturn during the depression in the 1930s (Caldwell, 2006;Easterlin, 1961). It is clear that our findings do not fit at all well with the mechanism of crowding out younger women from the labor market, while it is more compatible with others, such as improvements in maternal health and technological progress.…”

Causes of Mortality and Development: Evidence from Large Health Shocks in 20th Century America

“…For the purpose of generating su¢ cient explanatory variation, the authors pool these 15 diseases into a single shock variable. 3 The present analysis shows that this is possibly not without innocence. In fact, I obtain results very close to AJ for the US states if the ‡u/pneumonia and tuberculosis-shocks are combined into a single-index shock variable.…”

“…Starting with the 10-year panel model: columns (1)- (3) show that while the shocks to maternal and ‡u/pneumonia-mortality are positively linked to income, the e¤ect of the shock to tuberculosis is unrelated. Next, because the shocks are likely to be interrelated, column (4) includes them simultaneously.…”

Measuring and explaining the baby boom in the developed world in the mid-twentieth century

“…Much of the research into the causes of the baby boom has sought to provide an explanation based on economic factors, particularly in the case of the United States (Russell 2006;Emeka 2006;Murphy, Simon, and Tamura 2008;Tamura, Simon, and Murphy 2016;Jones and Schoonbroodt 2016). These studies give different justifications for this conundrum: Easterlin's hypotheses (1961Easterlin's hypotheses ( , 1965Easterlin's hypotheses ( , 1966Easterlin's hypotheses ( , 1975Easterlin's hypotheses ( , 1987, the relentless rise in real wages (Greenwood, Seshadri, and Vandenbroucke 2005), women's role in the workplace (Doepke, Hazan, and Maoz 2015;Macunovich 1996), the differences in salary between men and women (De Cooman, Ermisch, and Joshi 1987;Doepke, Hazan, and Maoz 2015), the differences in the maternal mortality (Albanesi and Olivetti 2014), and the falling price for space (Tamura and Simon 2017;Simon and Tamura 2009).…”

“…In the 1960s, many demographers thought that fertility rates would go on rising, hand in hand with economic development (Van Bavel 2010), but the figures peaked, and then a downward trend set in that was to last for 20 years. Even though the baby boom was a phenomenon with huge, long-lasting social impact, and despite the vast number of studies on this topic Emeka 2006;Caldwell 2006;Macunovich 2002;Sardon 2006;Sandström 2014;Van Bavel and Reher 2013;Reher 2015;Reher and Requena 2015), its causes are still not well understood (Albanesi and Olivetti 2014). The early research on this topic tried to account for it as a logical recovery following the end of WWII.…”