ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Pathways from education to fertility decline: a multi-site comparative study.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 49 citations in OpenAlex.
- Beyond education and contraceptive use: do caste, ethnicity, and religion influence fertility behaviour in Nepal? Evidence from six rounds of DHS.BMC women's health · 2026Article
- Two universal pathways in demographic transition.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Beyond Education and Contraceptive Use: Do Caste, Ethnicity, and Religion Influence Fertility Behavior in Nepal? Evidence from Six Rounds of DHS.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Fertility of Adults Born Very Preterm or With Very Low Birth Weight.JAMA network open · 2025Article
- Women's subsistence strategies predict fertility across cultures, but context matters.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- From the Ground Up: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Past Fertility and Population Narratives.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Trends and factors associated with declining lifetime fertility among married women in Kenya between 2003 and 2014: an analysis of Kenya demographic health surveys.BMC public health · 2023Article
- The human right to safely give birth: data from 193 countries show that gender equality does affect maternal mortality.BMC pregnancy and childbirth · 2022Article
- Article
- Weighted Bayesian Poisson Regression for The Number of Children Ever Born per Woman in Bangladesh.Journal of statistical theory and applications : JSTA · 2022Article
- Disentangling wealth effects on fertility in 64 low- and middle-income countries.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Determinants of Change in Fertility among Women in Rural Areas of Uganda.Journal of pregnancy · 2019Article
- The health benefits of secondary education in adolescents and young adults: An international analysis in 186 low-, middle- and high-income countries from 1990 to 2013.SSM - population health · 2017Article
- What do men want? Re-examining whether men benefit from higher fertility than is optimal for women.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- The cultural evolution of fertility decline.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- Status competition, inequality, and fertility: implications for the demographic transition.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Understanding variation in human fertility: what can we learn from evolutionary demography?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Women's education has emerged as a central predictor of fertility decline, but the many ways that education affects fertility have not been subject to detailed comparative investigation. Taking an evolutionary biosocial approach, we use structural equation modelling to examine potential pathways between education and fertility including: infant/child mortality, women's participation in the labour market, husband's education, social network influences, and contraceptive use or knowledge across three very different contexts: Matlab, Bangladesh; San Borja, Bolivia; and rural Poland. Using a comparable set of variables, we show that the pathways by which education affects fertility differ in important ways, yet also show key similarities. For example, we find that across all three contexts, education is associated with delayed age at first birth via increasing women's labour-force participation, but this pathway only influences fertility in rural Poland. In Matlab and San Borja, education is associated with lower local childhood mortality, which influences fertility, but this pathway is not important in rural Poland. Similarities across sites suggest that there are common elements in how education drives demographic transitions cross-culturally, but the differences suggest that local socioecologies also play an important role in the relationship between education and fertility decline.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.