Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record since 1800

Births in Australia are at an historical high - with around 285 000 babies born in 2007. This corresponds to an estimated total fertility rate of 1.93 babies per woman, the highest since the early 1980s. This is not a one-off event as fertility rates have been generally rising for the last 6 years. Overall, the evidence suggests that after its long downward trend after the Second World War, Australia's fertility rate may have stabilised at around 1.75 to 1.9 babies per woman. Much of the recent increase in the fertility rate is likely to reflect the fact that over the last few decades, younger women postponed childbearing and many are now having these postponed babies (so-called 'recuperation'). This has shown up as higher fertility rates for older women. However, some of the increase is also likely to be due to a 'quantum' effect - an increase in the number of babies women will ultimately have over their lifetimes. For example, today's young women say they are expecting to have more babies over their lifetime than those five years ago. Overall, Australia appears to be in a 'safe zone' of fertility, despite fertility levels being below replacement levels. There is no fertility crisis. Australia's population should continue to grow at one of the highest rates in the developed world because of migrant inflows. Feasibly attainable increases in fertility would not significantly allay ageing of the population, nor address its fiscal and labour market challenges. The views expressed in this paper are those of the staff involved and do not necessarily reflect those of the Productivity Commission.

Recent Trends in Australian Fertility

While there is a great deal of literature focusing on the relationship between income and fertility, little is known about how wealth affects fertility decisions of the household. This paper fills this gap in the literature by investigating how changes in housing wealth affect fertility. In particular, we use the wealth variation supplied by the recent housing boom and bust to generate exogenous variation in household wealth. We first conduct a state-level aggregate analysis to investigate how the birth rate is related to housing prices using differences in the timing and size of the housing market boom and bust across different states over time. We then conduct an analysis using restricted-use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics that allows us to track how women’s fertility behavior is related to individual-level housing price growth. The demographic and geographic controls in the PSID allow us to control extensively for any confounding effects driven by household selection across different cities or neighborhoods, and we find that for homeowners, a $10,000 increase in real housing wealth causes a 0.07 percent increase in fertility. We find little effects of MSA-level housing price growth on the fertility of renters, which supports our identification strategy. That increases in housing wealth are strongly associated with increases in fertility is consistent with some recent work showing a positive income effect on births, and our estimates are suggestive that the large recent variation in the housing market could have sizeable demographic effects that are driven by the positive effect of housing wealth on fertility.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1597744_code1243911.pdf?abstractid=1544607&mirid=3

Do Family Wealth Shocks Affect Fertility Choices? Evidence from the Housing Market Boom and Bust

A number of countries have begun implementing tax incentives designed to reverse the decline in fertility. Whether such incentives are effective or equitable remains an open question. During the early twentieth century, France initiated an unusual tax policy to promote fertility and marriage: Household income was divided by family size to obtain a final tax bracket. The policy was regressive in that fertility incentives were so large and greatest among the rich. Similar policies whose fertility benefit increases with income are being implemented today. Using hand-collected archival data from aggregate tax returns and three natural experiments, I find mixed evidence that these kinds of tax incentives affect fertility and marriage.

/pdf/can-countries-reverse-fertility-decline-evidence-from-france-mrcymywckl.pdf

Can countries reverse fertility decline? Evidence from France’s marriage and baby bonuses, 1929–1981

Historical Statistics est depuis pres d’un demi-siecle l’outil de reference de quiconque fait de l’histoire quantitative des Etats-Unis. On en est desormais a la quatrieme edition. La premiere datait de 1949 et couvrait les annees 1789 a 1945 ; la seconde, en 1960, etait plus etoffee, allant de l’epoque coloniale a 1957, avec un supplement en 1965 qui continuait les series jusqu’en 1962. La troisieme marquait un net progres en 1975 : surnommee « l’edition du bicentenaire », elle couvrait en d...

/pdf/historical-statistics-of-the-united-states-millenial-edition-3b9sd5f8rh.pdf

Historical Statistics of the United States: Millenial Edition. edited by Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, & Gavin Wright, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006, 5 volumes, 4 489 pages

One of the most commonly cited studies on the effect of child subsidies on fertility, Whittington, Alm, and Peters (1990), claimed a large positive effect of child tax benefits on fertility using time series methods. We revisit this question in light of recent increases in child tax benefits by replicating this earlier study and extending the analysis with an additional 20 years of data. We find that their results suffer from the spurious regression problem, and are not robust to differencing. We find evidence of a statistically significant fertility response to a change in the real value of child tax subsidies occurring with a one- to two-year lag, but a much smaller and statistically insignificant total effect after several years, suggesting that a change in the child tax subsidy most strongly affects the timing of births.

/pdf/fertility-response-to-the-tax-treatment-of-children-4cj55w040n.pdf

Fertility Response to the Tax Treatment of Children

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Fertility Response to the Tax Treatment of Children