The effect of women's schooling on fertility.

A researcher examined the effect of women's schooling on fertility, paying particular attention to whether women's schooling is an exogenous determinant of fertility. The analyzed data were from the US National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey for the years 1985-91. This survey is a random sample of 1500 English-speaking people, at least 18 years old, who live in noninstitutional settings. Estimates were made of children ever born to women aged 35-44 and 45=54 using ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares (with the latter including the schooling of the respondent's parents as variables). Other variables used besides schooling were age, being Black, region at age 16 (relative to the south), type of residence at age 16 (relative to cities of 250,000). being Catholic, being Mormon, and survey year. Using the Hausman test to regress the variable of schooling on the exogenous variables results in a residual, and a t-test on the coefficient for the residual will test for endogeneity. In each group of women, the t-statistic on the residual was 1.1, suggesting that schooling is not highly endogenous with fertility. Schooling does, however, have a highly negative effect on fertility in both estimates. A 10% increase in schooling is associated with a 10-12% decline in fertility for women aged 35-44 and with a 7-10% decline for women aged 45-54. Therefore, schooling can be used as an independent variable without leading to false acceptance of socioeconomic theories of fertility. Schooling may reduce fertility by increasing a woman's income, thus making child rearing more expensive, or by enhancing a woman's ability to control fertility.