Contraception and Fertility: Household Production Under Uncertainty
Over the past century fertility behavior in the United Stated has undergone profound changes Measured by cohort fertility the average number of children per married woman had declined from about 5.5 children at the time of the Civil War to 2.4 children at the time of the Great Depression. It is seldom emphasized however that an even greater relative change took place in the dispersion of fertility among these women: the percentage of women with, say, seven or more children declined from 36% to under 6%. While students of population have offered reasonably convincing explanations for the decline in fertility over time, they have not succeeded in explaining the fluctuations in the trend and have made surprisingly little effort to explain the large and systematic decline in the dispersion of fertility over time. In this paper we attempt to study contraception behavior and its effects on fertility. One of the effects on which we focus considerable attention is the dispersion or variance in fertility. Our analysis is applied to cross-sectional data but it also provides an explanation for the decline in the variance in fertility over time.
|Date of creation:||Dec 1973|
|Date of revision:|
|Publication status:||published as Michael, Robert T. and Robert J. Willis. "Contraception and Fertility: Household Production Under Uncertainty." Household Production and Consumption,edited by Nestor E. Terleckyj, Vol. 40. Columbia UUniversity Press, (1976),pp. 27-93.|
|Contact details of provider:|| Postal: |
Web page: http://www.nber.org
More information through EDIRC
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:0021. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ()
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.