A new research paper by Lisa Dettling and Melissa Schettini Kearney from the University of Maryland examines whether the fluctuation in home prices affects fertility rates. The authors used Vital Statistics data from 1990 – 2007, and Federal Housing Finance Agency Price Index (and alternately the Case-Shiller Index) to simulate equity/fertility correlations.
From the abstract:
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Our estimates suggest that a 10 percent increase in house prices would lead to a 4 percent increase in births among home owners, and a roughly one percent decrease among non-owners.
Along with its current sovereign debt issues, Europe has been facing a declining birthrate for the last couple decades- something that becomes a particular problem when welfare systems don’t have enough young contributors to support the old. But according to a recent RAND research brief, European fertility rates appear to be bouncing back.
Many European governments have been concerned about falling fertility rates, due to the welfare implications of an aging population supported by a shrinking workforce. However, ‘doomsday’ scenarios of fertility spiraling downwards and European populations imploding have not materialized; indeed, recent snapshots of indicators for childbearing suggest some recovery in fertility.
European women are still waiting longer to have children, but they’re having them at the same rate that they did a generation ago. The initial period in the 1970s and 1980s when women waited to have children left a data set that might be more of a hiccup than a permanent population change. Read More »
From a Pew Research Center analysis of the latest Census data:
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In the decade from 2000 to 2010, the Mexican-American population grew by 7.2 million as a result of births and 4.2 million as a result of new immigrant arrivals. This is a change from the previous two decades when the number of new immigrants either matched or exceeded the number of births.
The current surge in births among Mexican-Americans is largely attributable to the immigration wave that has brought more than 10 million immigrants to the United States from Mexico since 1970. Between 2006 and 2010 alone, more than half (53%) of all Mexican-American births were to Mexican immigrant parents. As a group, these immigrants are more likely than U.S.-born Americans to be in their prime child-bearing years. They also have much higher fertility.