ArticleResearch in economic history2021
Early Fertility Decline in the United States: Tests of Alternative Hypotheses using New IPUMS Complete-Count Census Microdata and Enhanced County-Level Data.
Article in Research in economic history, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- IPUMS Full Count Datasets of Enslaved Persons and Slaveholders in the United States in 1850 and 1860.Historical methods · 2025Article
- The Impact of Multiple Births on Fertility: Stopping and Spacing in the United States During the Demographic Transition.Demography · 2024Article
- Wealth and Child Mortality in the Nineteenth-Century United States: Evidence from Three Panels of American Couples, 1850-1880.Social science history · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The U. S. fertility transition in the nineteenth century is unusual. Not only did it start from a very high fertility level and very early in the nation's development, but it also took place long before the nation's mortality transition, industrialization, and urbanization. This paper assembles new county-level, household-level, and individual-level data, including new complete-count IPUMS microdata databases of the 1830-1880 censuses, to evaluate different theories for the nineteenth-century American fertility transition. We construct cross-sectional models of net fertility for currently-married white couples in census years 1830-1880 and test the results with a subset of couples linked between the 1850-1860, 1860-1870, and 1870-1880 censuses. We find evidence of marital fertility control consistent with hypotheses as early as 1830. The results indicate support for several different but complementary theories of the early U.S. fertility decline, including the land availability, conventional structuralist, ideational, child demand/quality-quantity tradeoff, and life-cycle savings theories.
Identifiers
36032065PMC9409409What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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