A Role for Cultural Transmission in Fertility Transitions

Cultural variables in economic analysis have recently experienced a strong renewal. This evolution sheds a new light on the old debate between the "Beckerian Model" of fertility and the "Synthesis Model" of fertility. In this paper, I propose a fertility model making the long run evolution of culture endogenous. The whole population is divided into two alternative cultures corresponding to specific preferences for fertility. Parents decide their fertility rate and try to transmit their culture to their children. Differential fertility between cultures gives rise to an evolutionary process while differential effort to transmit the parental culture gives rise to a cultural process. The long run distribution of preferences and the average total fertility rate in the population both result from interactions between these two processes. As a result, a fertility transition cannot appear without productivity shocks in favor of the culture which is not biased toward quantity of children. However, these asymetric productivity shocks are not always a sufficient conditon to undergo a fertility transition. JEL Codes: D10, J10, Z10 1I am grateful to Bertrand Wigniolle, David de la Croix, Hippolyte D’Albis, Thomas Seegmuller and Victor Hiller for their invaluable help. I also thank three anonymous referees for their usefull comments. The paper greatly benefited from rereading by Natacha Raffin and Marie-Pierre Dargnies. Discussion with the participants of the EUREQua team’s workshop in macroeconomics in Paris has been very enlightening.