TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Becker, Sascha O.
AU  - Cinnirella, Francesco
AU  - Woessmann, Ludger
        TI  - The Trade-off between Fertility and Education: Evidence from before the Demographic Transition
        PY  - 2009/Nov/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 4557
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp4557
        AB  - 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.
        KW  - schooling
KW  - 19th-century Prussia
KW  - unified growth theory
KW  - fertility transition
        ER  -