Joshua Lewis, University of Montreal - The Great Depression and Women’s Fertility

Title: From Bust to Boom: The Great Depression and Women’s Fertility (with Andriana Bellou and Emanuela Cardia)

Abstract: The United States experienced dramatic swings in fertility over the course of the early- and mid-20th century. This paper presents a novel explanation for these changes, linking the Great Depression to the contemporaneous fertility bust in the early 1930s, the baby boom from the late-1930s lasting through the 1950s, and the subsequent baby bust of the 1960s. Our empirical analysis is based on an event-study approach that links county-level measures of Depression severity to annual fertility rates over an extended 50-year time horizon. We find that the Great Depression can account for roughly 40 percent of the bust-boom-bust swings in fertility rates over the early and mid-20th century. The Great Depression can also account for the large cross-cohort changes in completed fertility, as well as within-cohort changes in lifecycle fertility that occurred over this time period.

Presenter:  Joshua Lewis, University of Montreal

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