French Fertility and Education Transition: Rational Choice vs. Cultural Diffusion

Faustine Perrin and David de la Croix

No 246, 2017 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: We analyze how much a parsimonious rational-choice model can explain the temporal and spatial variation in fertility and school enrollment in France during the 19th century. The originality of our approach is in our reliance on the structural estimation of a system of rst-order conditions to identify the deep parameters. Another new dimension is our use of gendered education data, allowing us to have a richer theory having implications for the gender wage and education gaps. Results indicate that the parsimonious rational-choice model explains 38 percent of the variation of fertility over time and across counties, as well as 71 percent and 83 percent of school enrollment of boys and girls, respectively. The analysis of the residuals (unexplained by the economic model) indicates that additional insights might be gained by considering cross-county differences in family structure and cultural barriers.

Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro and nep-his
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Working Paper: French Fertility and Education Transition: Rational Choice vs. Cultural Diffusion (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed017:246

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