The trade-off between fertility and education: evidence from before the demographic transition |
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Authors: | Sascha O Becker Francesco Cinnirella Ludger Woessmann |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK;(2) Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Poschingerstr. 5, 81679 Munich, Germany;(3) Department of Economics, University of Munich, Munich, Germany |
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Abstract: | The trade-off between child quantity and quality is a crucial ingredient of unified growth models that explain the transition
from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. We present first evidence that such a trade-off indeed existed already in the
nineteenth century, exploiting a unique census-based dataset of 334 Prussian counties in 1849. Furthermore, we find that causation
between fertility and education runs both ways, based on separate instrumental-variable models that instrument fertility by
sex ratios and education by landownership inequality and distance to Wittenberg. Education in 1849 also predicts the fertility
transition in 1880–1905. |
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