Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/36227 
Year of Publication: 
2009
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 4557
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
The trade-off between child quantity and education is a crucial ingredient of unified growth models that explain the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. We present first evidence that such a trade-off indeed existed before the demographic transition, exploiting a unique census-based dataset of 334 Prussian counties in 1849. Estimating two separate instrumental-variable models that instrument education by landownership inequality and distance to Wittenberg and fertility by previous-generation fertility and sex-imbalance ratio, we find that causation between fertility and education runs both ways. Furthermore, education in 1849 predicts the fertility transition in 1880-1905.
Subjects: 
Schooling
fertility transition
unified growth theory
19th-century Prussia
JEL: 
I20
J13
N33
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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