Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/51957 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 5885
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
This study tests the effect of relative income - younger people's earning potential relative to their aspirations, as approximated by older families' income - on two measures of fertility: the proportion of women with an own child under one year of age, and the proportion of women with at least one own child under eighteen. The results are highly supportive of the Easterlin relative income hypothesis, finding a dominant negative effect of older family income that extends due to postponement effects even into groups 11-15 years out of school. Increases in older family income are found to account for 42% of the decline in the proportion of women with a newborn, and 37% of the decline in the proportion with at least one own child, among women 0-5 years out of school. In addition, the study finds a strong but changing effect of the female wage: positive among women 0-5 years out of school, although slowly declining over time, but negative among the older women with a dominant positive time trend that has produced a positive effect in the last decade. It is hypothesized that the observed pattern of increases in fertility among women with higher levels of education over the last decade has been a function of this emerging positive effect of the female wage, among older more educated women.
Subjects: 
fertility, relative income
relative cohort size
Easterlin hypothesis
JEL: 
J13
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.