Abstract
The historical transition to a low fertility regime was central for long-run growth, but what caused it? Existing economic explanations largely focus on the economic incentives to limit fertility. This article presents new evidence highlighting the importance of cultural forces as a complementary driver of the fertility transition. We leverage a sharp change in fertility in Britain in 1877 and document large synchronized declines in fertility among culturally British households residing outside of Britain, in Canada, the US, and South Africa, relative to their non-British neighbours. We propose a plausible catalyst for the change: the famous Bradlaugh-Besant trial of 1877.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1669-1700 |
| Number of pages | 32 |
| Journal | Review of Economic Studies |
| Volume | 90 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 1 2023 |
Funding
We are particularly grateful to Nico Voigtlander for his contribution to the early stages of this project. We also thank Francesco Cinnirella, Bill Collins, Martin Dribe, Casper Worm Hansen, Stephan Heblich, Jane Humphries, Kevin O’Rourke, Peter Sandholt Jensen, Krishna Pendakur, Ethan Schmick, Marianne Wanamaker, Ariell Zimran, and seminar participants at Chapman, Columbia, Copenhagen, the 2019 annual meeting of the Economic History Association, George Mason, Harvard Business School, Lund, Michigan’s H2D2 Workshop, LSE, the 2020 NBER Summer Institute (DAE), NYU, Oxford, University of Pittsburgh, and Vanderbilt for helpful comments. This project was funded by a seed grant from the California Center for Population Research and NSF Career Grant No. 1552692. This paper subsumes NBER Working Paper W25752 “Censorship, family planning, and the historical fertility transition.”
Keywords
- Culture
- Demographic transition
- J13
- Media
- N34
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Economics and Econometrics
