The Economic Theory of Fertility Over Three Decades

Abstract

After a promising start some three decades ago, the application of micro-economic analysis to fertility studies has proved disappointing. It has not led to an increased understanding of fertility decisions nor to the policy insights which had been expected. This paper considers the reasons for this disappointment. It reviews briefly the development of the now dominant version of the economic approach to fertility analysis, the so-called "Chicago Model". It concludes that several basic conceptual and theoretical weaknesses of this approach have led it up a blind alley. The paper concludes with suggestions for new assumptions and approaches which may make the theory more relevant for policy programmes.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 143 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.