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Title: Slave Emancipation as a Natural Experiment in American Fertility
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2008
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Abstract: Economic theories of fertility decline often center on the declining economic value of children. Empirical tests of such theories are hampered both by the inability to adequately measure this value and by endogeneity bias. This paper uses the natural experiment of slave emancipation to overcome these issues. I exploit emancipation in the U.S. South between 1863 and 1865 as a plausibly exogenous changein the value of own children for slaveowning households. I develop a model of household production with own children and slave labor as inputs and use the model to show how the value of own children would have changed after emancipation. I construct a panel dataset of white Southern households between 1860 and 1870 and use this data to measure the fertility response of families to this changing value. Basedon evidence from the historical record, I hypothesize that small slaveowners and owners of young slaves were likely to experience the greatest increase in the value of their own children following emancipation while owners of adult female slaves would have experienced a lower postwar value. Indeed, the results show a strong, positive correlation between this predicted value of children and household fertility rates.By 1870, small slaveowners who had owned young slave children had fertility rates up to 37% greater than the non-slaveowning middle class. Large slaveowners who had owned adult female slaves exhibited a 31% reduction in fertility rates. These same patterns are not present in earlier time periods and do not, therefore, appear to represent unobserved fixed effects in household fertility. The results are consistent with theories of the demographic transition centered on the declining economic value of children.
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Authors: Wanamaker, Marianne H.
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Institution: Department of Economics, Northwestern University
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Publisher Location: New Haven, CT
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Fertility and Mortality
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