Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/55066 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 6015
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We study the relationship between education and fertility, exploiting compulsory schooling reforms in Europe as source of exogenous variation in education. Using data from 8 European countries, we assess the causal effect of education on the number of biological kids and the incidence of childlessness. We find that more education causes a substantial decrease in childlessness and an increase in the average number of children per woman. Our findings are robust to a number of falsification checks and we can provide complementary empirical evidence on the mechanisms leading to these surprising results.
Subjects: 
instrumental variables
education
fertility
JEL: 
I2
J13
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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