Fertility and the Easterlin hypothesis: an assessment of the literature.

In his inaugural presidential address to the Population Association of America in 1978, Richard Easterlin challenged the orthodox neoclassical economic model of fertility originally suggested by Becker and subsequently elaborated by Becker and Lewis. While maintaining an economic approach to fertility, Easterlin's model was based upon the notion of material aspirations which changed systematically as a function of income and prices. Easterlin and most sociologists saw the Easterlin model as an attempt to bring sociology into economics, and believed that a discipline of economics which could not accommodate changing preferences was unfeasible. This paper focuses upon the fertility aspects of the Easterlin hypothesis, critically assessing the available fertility literature generated by Easterlin, as well as the complete inventory of data and methodologies in 76 published analyses. An equal number of micro- and macro-level analyses using North American data offer equal, significant support for the hypothesis. While the literature suggests absolute support for the relativity of the income concept in fertility, it is less clear on the sources of differences in material aspirations, and suggests that the observed relationship between fertility and cohort size has varied across countries and time periods due to the effects of additional factors not included in most models.