Discussion paper

DP12531 How Far Can Economic Incentives Explain the French Fertility and Education Transition?

We analyze how much a core rational-choice model can explain the temporal and
spatial variation in fertility and school enrollment in France during the 19th century. The
originality of our approach is in our reliance on the structural estimation of a system of
first-order conditions to identify the deep parameters. Another new dimension is our use
of gendered education data, allowing us to have a richer theory having implications for the
gender wage and education gaps. Results indicate that the parsimonious rational-choice
model explains 38 percent of the variation of fertility over time and across counties, as
well as 71 percent and 83 percent of school enrollment of boys and girls, respectively. The
analysis of the residuals (unexplained by the economic model) indicates that additional
insights might be gained by interacting incentives with cross-county differences in family
structure and cultural barriers.

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Citation

De La Croix, D (2017), ‘DP12531 How Far Can Economic Incentives Explain the French Fertility and Education Transition?‘, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 12531. CEPR Press, Paris & London. https://cepr.org/publications/dp12531