Early Fertility Decline in the United States: Tests of Alternative Hypotheses using New County-level and Individual-Level Census Data release_norxgfr6tbalngz4yfpuwz53ea

Abstract

The U.S. fertility transition in the nineteenth century is unusual. Not only did it start from a very high fertility level and very early in the nation's development, but it also took place long before the nation's mortality transition, industrialization, and urbanization. This paper assembles new county-level, household-level, and individual-level data for census years 1800-1880 to evaluate different theories for the nineteenth-century American fertility transition. We construct county-level models of child-woman ratios in all census years and couple-level models of marital fertility in census years 1830-1880. We find evidence of marital fertility control consistent with hypotheses as early as 1835. The results indicate support for several different but complimentary theories of the early U.S. fertility decline, including the land availability, local labor market/child default, conventional structuralist, ideational, and life-cycle savings theories. We emphasize discussion of the life-cycle savings hypothesis, which has received limited empirical study to date.
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