Education and Fertility

In a series of economic history projects, we show that the education of the population had a substantial effect on the decline in fertility and thus on the demographic transition towards the end of the 19th century. In the pre-industrial world described by Thomas Malthus, economic progress merely led to additional births, so that income per capita stagnated at the subsistence level. The historical evolution from stagnation to modern economic growth has been closely linked to the demographic transition in which the number of children per family declined significantly.

Our research shows that it was the increasing education of the population which contributed to the decreasing number of children and thus to modern growth. In two contributions, we show that a family can afford fewer children for a given budget if it invests more in the education of each child. We find this inverse relationship between the number of children and education per child - the so-called child quantity-quality trade-off - already before the demographic transition. In a third contribution, we show that in addition, better-educated parents chose to have fewer children.

Research papers:

The Trade-off between Fertility and Education: Evidence from before the Demographic Transition (with S.O. Becker and F. Cinnirella). Journal of Economic Growth 15 (3): 177-204, 2010

The Effect of Investment in Children’s Education on Fertility in 1816 Prussia (with S.O. Becker and F. Cinnirella). Cliometrica 6 (1): 29-44, 2012

Does Women’s Education Affect Fertility? Evidence from Pre-Demographic Transition Prussia (with S.O. Becker and F. Cinnirella). European Review of Economic History 17 (1): 24-44, 2013

Non-technical contributions:

Education and Socio-Economic Development during the Industrialization (with S.O. Becker). In: C. Diebolt, M. Haupert (eds.), Handbook of Cliometrics, 2nd ed., Berlin: Springer, 2019

How Luther’s Quest for Education Changed German Economic History: 9+5 Theses on the Effects of the Protestant Reformation (with S.O. Becker). In: J.-P. Carvalho, S. Iyer, J. Rubin (eds.), Advances in the Economics of Religion, International Economic Association Series, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 215-227, 2019

Material available only in German

Newspaper article:

Sind Protestanten schlauer? Die Zeit, No. 42, 12.10.2017, p. 76

Non-technical contribution:

Die Bedeutung von Bildung für die Wirtschaftsentwicklung: Eine neue wirtschaftshistorische Forschungsagenda anhand preußischer Kreisdaten, Teil 2. ifo Schnelldienst 64 (1): 41-47, 2011