Does women's education affect fertility? Evidence from pre-demographic transition Prussia

摘要

While women's employment opportunities, relative wages, and the child quantity-quality trade-off have been studied as factors underlying historical fertility limitation, the role of women's education has received little attention. We combine Prussian county data from three censuses-1816,1849, and 1867-to estimate the relationship between women's education and their fertility before the demographic transition. Despite controlling for several demand and supply factors, we find a negative residual effect of women's education on fertility. Instrumental-variable estimates using educational variation deriving from landow-nership concentration, as well as panel estimates controlling for fixed effects of counties, suggest that the effect of women's education on fertility is causal.