An Empirical Investigation of Beliefs, Work, and Fertility

We study the e¤ect of culture on important economic outcomes by using the 1970 Census to examine the work and fertility behavior of women 30-40 years old, born in the U.S., but whose parents were born elsewhere. We use past female labor force participation and total fertility rates from the country of ancestry as our cultural proxies. These variables should capture, in addition to past economic and institutional conditions, the beliefs commonly held about the role of women in society, i.e. culture. Given the di¤erent time and place, only the beliefs embodied in the cultural proxies should be potentially relevant to women’s behavior in the US in 1970. We show that these cultural proxies have positive and signi...cant explanatory power for individual work and fertility outcomes, even after controlling for possible indirect e¤ects of culture (e.g., education and spousal characteristics). We examine alternative hypotheses for these positive correlations and show that neither unobserved human capital nor networks are likely to be responsible. We also show that the e¤ect of these cultural proxies is ampli...ed the greater is the tendency for ethnic groups to cluster in the same neighborhoods. JEL Nos.: J13, J21, Z10.