Gender empowerment as an enforcer of individuals’ choice between education and fertility : Evidence from 19th century France

Summary, in English

Recent theoretical developments in growth models, triggered particularly by unified theories of growth, suggest that the child quantity-quality trade-off is a defining element in our explanation of a transition from Malthusian stagnation to a sustained growth path. This paper presents a model and derive a testable empirical framework to investigate the role of gender in the trade-off between education and fertility for 86 French counties during the 19th century. Endogeneity-mitigated mean- and median-based regressions offer robust empirical predictions for gender-empowered quality-quantity trade-off. In particular, we find the existence of a significant and negative association between education and fertility. Further, while gaging the differential effects of schooling on fertility, we find that the short-run differences between male and female are small whilst the long-run effects are large. From policy perspective, our results imply that for stable long-run growth it matters not just that parents educate their children, but specifically that they choose to educate girls.

• Author: Claude Diebolt; Tapas Mishra; Faustine Perrin
• Department/s: Growth, technological change, and inequality; Centre for Economic Demography
• Publishing year: 2021-08
• Language: English
• Pages: 408-438
• Publication/Series: Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
• Volume: 188
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2021.05.011
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Topic: Economic History; Economics
• Keywords: Cliometrics; Education; fertility; Gender difference; Model of individuals’ choice; Nineteenth century France; Quality-Quantity trade-off; Unified growth theory
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 0167-2681