American Economic Review Vol. 95 No. 1 2005

The Baby Boom and Baby Bust

Jeremy Greenwood¹; Ananth Seshadri²; Guillaume Vandenbroucke³

¹ Department of Economics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627. · ² Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1180 Observatory Dr., Madison, WI 53706 · ³ Department of Economics, University of Southern California, 3620 S. Vermont Ave. KAP 324F, Los Angeles, CA 90089.

Abstract

What caused the baby boom? And can it be explained within the context of the secular decline in fertility that has occurred over the last 200 years? The hypothesis is that: (a) The secular decline in fertility is due to the relentless rise in real wages that increased the opportunity cost of having children; (b) The baby boom is explained by an atypical burst of technological progress in the household sector that occurred in the middle of the last century. This lowered the cost of having children. A model is developed in an attempt to account, quantitatively, for both the baby boom and bust.

DOI

10.1257/0002828053828680

Volume

95

Issue

1

Pages

183-207

Language

en

Sources

bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite

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