Fertility and Modernity / Enrico Spolaore, Romain Wacziarg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Spolaore, Enrico.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Wacziarg, Romain.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w25957.

NBER working paper series no. w25957

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2019.

Summary:

We investigate the determinants of the fertility decline in Europe from 1830 to 1970 using a newly constructed dataset of linguistic distances between European regions. We find that the fertility decline resulted from a gradual diffusion of new fertility behavior from French-speaking regions to the rest of Europe. We observe that societies with higher education, lower infant mortality, higher urbanization, and higher population density had lower levels of fertility during the 19th and early 20th century. However, the fertility decline took place earlier and was initially larger in communities that were culturally closer to the French, while the fertility transition spread only later to societies that were more distant from the cultural frontier. This is consistent with a process of social influence, whereby societies that were linguistically and culturally closer to the French faced lower barriers to the adoption of new social norms and attitudes towards fertility control.

Notes:

Print version record

June 2019.