Human Capital and Fertility in Chinese Clans Before Modern Growth

Carol Shiue ()

No 9746, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper studies the pre-industrial origins of modern-day fertility decline. The setting is in Anhwei Province, China over the 13th to 19th centuries, a period well before the onset of China?s demographic transition and industrialization. There are four main results. First, we observe non-Malthusian effects in which high income households had relatively fewer children. Second, higher income households had relatively more educated sons, consistent with their greater ability to support major educational investments. Third, those households that invested in education had fewer children, suggesting that households producing educated children were reallocating resources away from child quantity and towards child quality. Fourth, over time, demand for human capital fell significantly. The most plausible reason is the declining returns to educational investments. The findings point to a role for demography in explaining China?s failure to industrialize early on.

Keywords: Demographic transition; Economic history of china; Fertility; Human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J11 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-gro, nep-his and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP9746 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Human capital and fertility in Chinese clans before modern growth (2017)
Working Paper: Human Capital and Fertility in Chinese Clans Before Modern Growth (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9746

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP9746

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().