Explaining the Revolution in U.S. Fertility, Schooling, and Women’s Work among Households Formed in 1875, 1900, and 1925
Factors Affecting Worker Well-being: The Impact of Change in the Labor Market
ISBN: 978-1-78441-150-3, eISBN: 978-1-78441-149-7
Publication date: 10 November 2014
Abstract
This paper addresses revolutionary changes in the education, fertility and market work of U.S. families formed in the 1870s–1920s: Fertility fell from 5.3 to 2.6; the graduation rate of their children increased from 7% to 50%; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented work increased from 7% to 23% (by one measure).
These trends are addressed within a unified framework to examine the ability of several proposed mechanisms to quantitatively replicate these changes. Based on careful calibration, the choices of successive generations of representative husband-and-wife households over the quantity and quality of their children, household production, and the extent of mother’s involvement in market-oriented production are simulated.
Rising wages, declining mortality, a declining gender wage gap, and increased efficiency and public provision of schooling cannot, individually or in combination, reduce fertility or increase stocks of human capital to levels seen in the data. The best fit of the model to the data also involves: (1) a decreased tendency among parents to view potential earnings of children as the property of parents and (2) rising consumption shares per dependent child.
Greater attention should be given the determinants of parental control of the work and earnings of children for this period.
One contribution is the gathering of information and strategies necessary to establish an initial baseline, and the time paths for parameters and targets for this period beset with data limitations. A second contribution is identifying the contributions of various mechanisms toward reaching those calibration targets.
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Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Marie Steele for wonderful – and cheerful – research assistance. We also thank Peter Rangazas, Marianne Wanamaker, and seminar participants at the Western Economic Association meetings, Meetings of the Cliometric Society, and the Public Policy Seminar at UMBC for useful comments.
Citation
Cinyabuguma, M., Lord, W. and Viauroux, C. (2014), "Explaining the Revolution in U.S. Fertility, Schooling, and Women’s Work among Households Formed in 1875, 1900, and 1925", Factors Affecting Worker Well-being: The Impact of Change in the Labor Market (Research in Labor Economics, Vol. 40), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 1-78. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0147-912120140000040001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2014 Emerald Group Publishing Limited