Endogenous fertility with a sibship size effect - Université de Lorraine
Journal Articles Macroeconomic Dynamics Year : 2016

Endogenous fertility with a sibship size effect

Abstract

Since the seminal work of Becker, the dynamics of endogenous fertility has been based on the trade-off faced by parents between the quantity and the quality of their children. However, in developing countries, when child labor is an indispensable source of household income, parents actually incur a negative cost for having an extra child, so that the trade-offdisappears. The purpose of this paper is to restore the Beckerian quantity-quality trade-off in the case intergenerational transfers are upstream, so as to keep fertility endogenous. We do that by adding a negative “sibship size effect” on human capital formation to the standard Becker model. With a simple specification, we obtain multiplicity of steady states or, more fundamentally, the possibility of a jump from a state with high fertility and low income to a state with low fertility and high income, triggered by a continuous increase in the productivity of human capital formation.

Dates and versions

hal-01723075 , version 1 (05-03-2018)

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Elise Brezis, Rodolphe dos Santos Ferreira. Endogenous fertility with a sibship size effect. Macroeconomic Dynamics, 2016, 20 (08), pp.2046 - 2066. ⟨10.1017/S1365100515000255⟩. ⟨hal-01723075⟩
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