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2019 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

3. Childlessness and Economic Development: A Survey

verfasst von : Thomas Baudin, David de la Croix, Paula E. Gobbi

Erschienen in: Human Capital and Economic Growth

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter shows why, beyond average fertility, childlessness matters in itself. Childlessness reacts to economic incentives in a peculiar way, which cannot be described by usual economic models of fertility. We make a distinction between childlessness due to poverty and childlessness due to economic opportunities. It allows to better understand the dynamics of childlessness along the history but also why the extensive margin of fertility (childlessness) does not adjust to economic shocks and development policies in the same way as the intensive margin (number of children of mothers). Introducing marriage into this framework provides new insights: higher educational homogamy per se decreases childlessness as it favors marriage. Nevertheless, because educational homogamy is most of the time accompanied by a rise in female education, it may also be associated with increases in childlessness in the data.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Optimal Life-Cycle Education Decisions of Atomistic Individuals

Nächstes Kapitel Demographic Change, Wage Inequality, and Technology

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The theoretical frameworks of Gobbi (2013) and Aaronson et al. (2014) focus on this type of childlessness.

In technical words, the cost of providing one unit of education to n children is equal to ρe; it does not depend on n. Most of the literature assumes that the cost of providing one unit of education to n children equals ρne. Our assumption does not change our main results qualitatively as it does not prevent the existence of a trade-off between the quality and the quantity of children. See Baudin (2011, 2012) for a generalization.

As shown in Jones et al. (2010), because of the log specification of the utility function, a positive non-labor income ensures the negative fertility-income relationship at the aggregate level. As mentioned by them, this could be gifts, lottery income, or bequests.

The condition τν > α should be read as follows: for a given ν, the time cost of having children has to be high enough; while for a given τ, the reservation utility in case of childlessness should be high enough.

For the sake of space and simplicity, we do not analyze the specification of the model in which investing in human capital is possible, while opportunity-driven childlessness does not exist but poverty-driven childlessness does. Baudin and Stelter (2018b) study such a framework allowing, furthermore, for the existence of agricultural and industrial goods.

Obviously, n ≥ 0 and \(n\leq \frac {1}{\tau }\) cannot bind simultaneously.

See Baudin et al. (2015) or Greenwood et al. (2003) for representative examples.

Gobbi (2018) provides a semi-cooperative model of household decisions to explain how the time to raise children varies endogenously across households of different education levels.

We implicitly assume here that the utility function of men is the same as that of women in the previous sections: u^m(c^m, n) with \(u^m(w^m+\Omega ,0)\in \mathbb {R}\) representing the indirect utility of a single man.

Hiller and Baudin (2016) and Baudin and Hiller (2019) extensively discuss the interactions between gender differences in preferences and marital behaviors.

This effect appears as the movement of the exponential part of the cumulative distribution function of love shocks for men and women.

In Eq. (3.6), this effect corresponds to the variations of Δ^f(w^f, w^m).

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Titel: Childlessness and Economic Development: A Survey
verfasst von: Thomas Baudin
David de la Croix
Paula E. Gobbi
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: Human Capital and Economic Growth
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-21598-9

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-21599-6

Copyright-Jahr: 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21599-6_3