Fecundity, Fertility and The Formation of Human Capital

Abstract

Exploiting a genealogy of English individuals living in the 16th to the 19th centuries, this study shows that lower parental reproductive capacity positively affected the socio-economic achievements of offspring.Using the time interval between the date of marriage and the first birth as a measure of reproductive capacity, we find that parental fecundity positively affected the number of siblings and that children of parents with lower fecundity were more likely to become literate and employed in skilled and high-income professions.This suggests there was a trade-off between child quantity and quality in England during the industrial revolution, supporting leading theories of the origins of modern economic growth.Falling fertility rates and rising levels of human capital are central features of the centuries-long historical transition from economic stagnation to modern economic growth.Long-run growth theories have placed the trade-off between child quantity and child quality at the heart of this transition, arguing that technological progress incentivised parents to increase investment in their children's human capital by giving birth to fewer children (Galor and Weil, 2000; Galor, 2011). 1 Studies based on contemporary populations and inventive empirical strategies have generally not found clear-cut

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