文档介绍：Differential Fertility, Human Capital, and Development
Tom Vogl∗
Princeton University and NBER
March 2013
Abstract
Discussions of cross-sectional fertility heterogeneity and its interaction with economic
growth typically assume that the poor have more children than the rich. Micro-data
from 48 developing countries suggest that this phenomenon is very recent. Over the
second half of the twentieth century, these countries saw the association of economic
status with fertility and the association of the number of siblings with their education
flip from generally positive to generally negative. Because large families switched from
investing in more education to investing in less, heterogeneity in fertility across fami-
lies initially increased but now largely decreases average educational attainment. While
changes in GDP per capita, women’s work, position, urbanization, and pop-
ulation health do not explain the reversal, roughly half of it can be attributed to the
rising aggregate education levels of the parent generation. The results are most con-
sistent with theories of the fertility transition based on changing preferences over the
quality and quantity of children, and somewhat less so with theories that incorporate
subsistence consumption constraints.
∗E-mail: ******@. An earlier draft of this paper circulated under the title: “Family Size and Investment
in Children over the Fertility Transition.” I thank Anne Case, Currie, Angus Deaton, Thomas Fujiwara, Kyle Meng,
Ben Olken, Shing-Yi Wang and seminar participants at Harvard, MIT, Princeton, the World Bank, and NBER Summer
Institute for ments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Claudia Olivetti for sharing her data on female
labor force participation.
1 Introduction
From the moment the early greats of statistics defined the concept of correlation, they expressed
concern that the negative correlations between various desirable attributes and fertility spelle