%0 Report
        %A Becker, Sascha O.
%A Cinnirella, Francesco
%A Woessmann, Ludger
        %T The Trade-off between Fertility and Education: Evidence from before the Demographic Transition
        %D 2009
        %8 2009 Nov
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 4557
        %U https://www.iza.org/publications/dp4557
        %X 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.
        %K schooling
%K 19th-century Prussia
%K unified growth theory
%K fertility transition