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The demand for children on the part of farm couples in antebellum America declined as labor market opportunities outside the agricultural sector improved. A connection between these two secular developments was forged by the operation of the old-age security motive for raising children. In exchange for their role in providing old-age security for their parents, the mature offspring of a farm couple expected to receive a portion of the farm family's wealth, either as an inheritance or as an inter vivos transfer. The terms of this exchange are modeled as the outcome of an intergenerational bargaining process. The bargaining position and hence the allotted share of the young improved when they could point to greater opportunities for employment which they would forgo by remaining in the neighborhood of the parental farmstead. The value of children as old-age security assets consequently diminished. Under identifiable conditions, rational parents would respond by reducing their fertility. In multivariate regressions to explain the antebellum United States pattern of geographical variation in a fertility index (the rural white refined birth ratio), measures of nonagricultural labor market opportunities are found to have a large and significantly negative effect, as the foregoing theory predicts. The most widely cited alternative explanation for temporal and spatial variations in the fertility of the rural white population—the decreasing availability of cheap farmland with the progress of settlement—is shown to have little explanatory power when the labor market opportunity variables are included in the cross-section regression for state-wide averages in 1840.
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