Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-r7xzm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T11:38:24.211Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Implications for the growth–inequality relationship

from PART ONE - DIFFERENTIAL FERTILITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

David de la Croix
Affiliation:
Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Get access

Summary

The quantity–quality model was originally developed to account for fertility rates in the cross-section of a given country. In almost every country, fertility in the population at a given moment in time is a negative function of income. The quantity–quality model explains this observation in the same way that it accounts for the demographic transition. Since for educated women the opportunity cost of child-rearing time is high, they will prefer to invest in the education or “quality” of a small number of children. For less educated women, by contrast, the opportunity cost of raising children is low, while providing education is expensive relative to their income. Mothers with little education and low income would therefore prefer to have many children but invest little in the education of each child. Figure 2.1 illustrates this fact with detailed and robust data using twelve education categories for married mothers aged 45–70 in the US Census 1990. It shows that completed fertility drops monotonically with the education of the mother. Such a pattern for the USA was contested recently by Hazan and Zoabi (2011), who find a U-shaped relationship between period fertility and mother's education. However, even in their study, the fertility at the low end of the education distribution remains higher than the fertility of mothers with high education.

From recent research on developing economies we know that fertility differentials between high- and low-educated mothers can be quite large (Kremer and Chen (2002)).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×