Explaining the Revolution in U.S. Fertility, Schooling and Womens Work Among Households Formed in 1875, 1900 and 1925

Research paper: human capital, fertility, MFLFPR, history, calibration Structured 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 percent; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented work increased from 7 to 23 percent (by one measure). -These trends are addressed within a uni…ed 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 e¢ ciency 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 …t 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. Keywords: American Family, Quantity-Quality Trade-O¤, Convergence, High School Movement, Married Female Labor Force Participation Rate. JEL classi…cation numbers: I21, J13, J22, N31, and N32. Matthias Cinyabuguma and Christelle Viauroux are Assistant Professors of Economics at UMBC, and William Lord is Professor of Economics at UMBC. 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.