Pierre André Chiappori (Columbia) "Family Economics" - Cemmap

24 1. Facts
1.4 Children
Children are the most important ‘products’ of the family. The decision
about how many children to have, when to have them and how to care for
them interacts importantly with a whole host of other decisions including
schooling, marriage, divorce and re-marriage.
1.4.1 Fertility
As we saw, for marriage and divorce there is considerable heterogeneity
across countries and time and this is even more true for fertility. Figure
1.30 presents the time path for completed fertility for cohorts of US women
born between 1903 and 1956. 7 The most important feature of this figure is
that there are significant variations across cohorts in the mean number of
children per woman. Thus, women born early in the century had about 2.2
children, those born in the mid-1930’s (the mothers of the ‘baby-boom’)
hadoverthreechildrenandthoseborninthefifties had close to two. Table
1.15 shows the change in the distribution of children born for women born
in the mid-1930’s and in the late 1950’s. As can be seen the change in the
mean is partly a result of fewer women born in the 1930’s being childless
and partly a result of these women having larger families, conditional on
having a child at all. Particularly striking is that the modal family size
for the older cohort is 4+ but only 2 for the younger cohort. Figure 1.31
shows data on the number of children less than 18 of US women (married
or single), aged 35−45, atdifferent periods of time. 8 As seen, the reduction
in fertility and marriage rates during the second half of the 20’th century
is associated with a decrease in the proportion of women with more than 3
children and an increase in the proportion of women with no children, while
the proportion of women with 1 or 2 children remained unchanged at about
half. By 2000-2005, the proportion of women with children is still high (67
percent) indicating that the natural desire to have children remains strong.
Figure 1.32 shows that the birth rate fluctuates dramatically over time.
We see a large increase from the mid-1930’s to the early 1960’s and then
7 Completed fertility is defined as the mean number of children born to women of
a given generation at the end of their childbearing years. This is calculated by adding
the fertility rates by age of the mother observed for successive years, when the cohort
has reached the age in question (in general, only ages between 15 and 49 years are
considered). In practice, the fertility rates for older women can be estimated using the
rates observed for previous generations, without waiting for the cohort to reach the end
ofthereproductiveperiod.
8 Table 1.15 and Figure 20 provide different but complementary information. The table
shows completed fertility whereas the figure shows the number of children less than 18
living with the mother. Therefore, the proportion of women who have no children living
with them in the figure is larger than the proportion of women who never had children
in the table.