IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bro/econwp/2015-6.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Industrialization and the Fertility Decline

Author

Listed:
  • Raphael Franck
  • Oded Galor

Abstract

The research provides the first empirical examination of the hypothesized effect of industrialization on the fertility decline. Exploiting exogenous source of regional variations in the adoption of steam engines across France, the study establishes that industrialization was a major catalyst in the fertility decline in the course of the demographic transition. Moreover, the analysis further suggests that the contribution of industrialization to the decline in fertility plausibly operated through the effect of industrialization on human capital formation. Thus, the study confirms one of the central elements of Unified Growth Theory which hypothesizes that a critical force in the transition from stagnation to growth was by the impact of industrialization on the onset of the demographic transition, via the rise in the demand for human capital.

Suggested Citation

  • Raphael Franck & Oded Galor, 2015. "Industrialization and the Fertility Decline," Working Papers 2015-6, Brown University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:bro:econwp:2015-6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://economics.brown.edu/sites/g/files/dprerj726/files/papers/2015-6_paper.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Diebolt, Claude & Mishra, Tapas & Perrin, Faustine, 2015. "Did Gender-Bias Matter in the Quantity-Quality Trade-off in 19th Century France?," Lund Papers in Economic History 141, Lund University, Department of Economic History.
    2. David de la Croix & Faustine Perrin, 2016. "French Fertility and Education Transition: Rational Choice vs. Cultural Diffusion," LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES 2016007, Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES).
    3. Sunha Myong & JungJae Park & Junjian Yi, 2021. "Social Norms and Fertility," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 19(5), pages 2429-2466.
    4. Marina Gindelsky & Remi Jedwab, 2023. "Killer cities and industrious cities? New data and evidence on 250 years of urban growth," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 23(1), pages 179-208.
    5. Brian Beach & W. Walker Hanlon, 2019. "Censorship, Family Planning, and the Historical Fertility Transition," NBER Working Papers 25752, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Thomas Baudin & Robert Stelter, 2016. "Rural exodus and fertility at the time of industrialization," LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES 2016020, Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES).
    7. Katz‬‏, ‪Ori, 2018. "Railroads, Economic Development, and the Demographic Transition in the United States," MPRA Paper 88869, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economic Growth; Fertility Transition; Human Capital; Industrialization; Steam Engine.;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bro:econwp:2015-6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Brown Economics Webmaster (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.