IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/egc/wpaper/838.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Fertility in South Dublin a Century Ago: A First Look

Author

Listed:
  • Timothy Guinnane

    (Economic Growth Center, Yale University)

  • Carolyn Moehling

    (Economic Growth Center, Yale University)

  • Cormac O Grada

Abstract

Ireland's relatively late and feeble fertility transition remains poorly-understood. The leading explanations stress the role of Catholicism and a conservative social ethos. This paper reports the first results from a project that uses new samples from the 1911 census of Ireland to study fertility in Dublin and Belfast. Our larger project aims to use the extensive literature on the fertility transition elsewhere in Europe to refine and test leading hypotheses in their Irish context. The present paper uses a sample from the Dublin suburb of Pembroke to take a first look at the questions, data, and methods. This sample is much larger than those used in previous studies of Irish fertility, and is the first from an urban area. We find considerable support for the role of religion, networks, and other factors stressed in the literature on the fertility transition, but the data also show a role for the social-class effects downplayed in recent discussions.

Suggested Citation

  • Timothy Guinnane & Carolyn Moehling & Cormac O Grada, 2001. "Fertility in South Dublin a Century Ago: A First Look," Working Papers 838, Economic Growth Center, Yale University.
  • Handle: RePEc:egc:wpaper:838
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.econ.yale.edu/growth_pdf/cdp838.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Patricia Watterson, 1988. "Infant mortality by Father’s occupation from the 1911 Census of England and Wales," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 25(2), pages 289-306, May.
    2. Timothy Guinnane & Barbara Okun & James Trussell, 1994. "What do we know about the timing of fertility transitions in europe?," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 31(1), pages 1-20, February.
    3. Brendan M. Walsh, 1970. "Marriage Rates and Population Pressure: Ireland, 1871 and 1911," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 23(1), pages 148-162, April.
    4. Haines, Michael R., 1985. "Inequality and Childhood Mortality: a Comparison of England and Wales, 1911, and the United States, 1900," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 45(4), pages 885-912, December.
    5. O Grada, Cormac & Duffy, Niall, 1995. "Fertility Control Early in Marriage in Ireland a Century Ago," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 8(4), pages 423-431, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Cormac Ó Gráda, 2002. "Infant and Child Mortality in Dublin a Century Ago," Working Papers 200228, School of Economics, University College Dublin.
    2. Guinnane, Timothy W. & Moehling, Carolyn M. & Grada, Cormac O, 2002. "The Fertility of the Irish in America in 1910," Center Discussion Papers 28386, Yale University, Economic Growth Center.
    3. Iyer, S. & Weeks, M., 2004. "Multiple Social Interaction and Reproductive Externalities: An Investigation of Fertility Behaviour in Kenya," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 0461, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    4. Guinnane Timothy W., 2006. "Der europäische Geburtenrückgang: Überblick, Erklärungen und Stand der Forschung," Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook, De Gruyter, vol. 47(2), pages 249-273, December.
    5. Connor, Dylan, 2021. "In the name of the father? Fertility, religion and child naming in the demographic transition," SocArXiv jndqu, Center for Open Science.
    6. Guinnane, Timothy W. & Moehling, Carolyn M. & O Grada, Cormac, 2006. "The fertility of the Irish in the United States in 1910," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 43(3), pages 465-485, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Cormac Ó Gráda, 2006. "Dublin Jewish Demography a Century Ago," The Economic and Social Review, Economic and Social Studies, vol. 37(2), pages 123-147.
    2. Cormac Ó Gráda, 2002. "Infant and Child Mortality in Dublin a Century Ago," Working Papers 200228, School of Economics, University College Dublin.
    3. Robert W. Fogel, 1986. "Nutrition and the Decline in Mortality since 1700: Some Preliminary Findings," NBER Chapters, in: Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth, pages 439-556, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Sascha Becker & Francesco Cinnirella & Ludger Woessmann, 2010. "The trade-off between fertility and education: evidence from before the demographic transition," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 15(3), pages 177-204, September.
    5. Timothy W. Guinnane, 2011. "The Historical Fertility Transition: A Guide for Economists," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 49(3), pages 589-614, September.
    6. Guinnane, Timothy & Streb, Jochen, 2019. "Bismarck to no Effect: Fertility Decline and the Introduction of Social Insurance in Prussia," Working Papers 13, German Research Foundation's Priority Programme 1859 "Experience and Expectation. Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour", Humboldt University Berlin.
    7. Katharina Mühlhoff, 2022. "Darwin beats malthus: evolutionary anthropology, human capital and the demographic transition," Cliometrica, Springer;Cliometric Society (Association Francaise de Cliométrie), vol. 16(3), pages 575-614, September.
    8. Enrico Spolaore & Romain Wacziarg, 2022. "Fertility and Modernity," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 132(642), pages 796-833.
    9. Fernihough, Alan & Ó Gráda, Cormac & Walsh, Brendan M., 2015. "Intermarriage in a divided society: Ireland a century ago," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 1-14.
    10. Cormac Gráda, 1991. "New evidence on the fertility transition in Ireland 1880–1911," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 28(4), pages 535-548, November.
    11. Dirk J. van de Kaa, 1999. "Editorial: Without Maps and Compass? Towards a New European Transition Project," European Journal of Population, Springer;European Association for Population Studies, vol. 15(4), pages 309-316, December.
    12. Frans van Poppel & David Reher & Alberto Sanz-Gimeno & María Sanchez-Dominguez & Erik Beekink, 2012. "Mortality decline and reproductive change during the Dutch demographic transition," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 27(11), pages 299-338.
    13. Bhattacharya, Joydeep & Chakraborty, Shankha, 2014. "Contraception and the fertility transition," ISU General Staff Papers 201410220700001028, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
    14. Yu Bai & Yanjun Li & Pak Hung Lam, 2023. "Quantity-quality trade-off in Northeast China during the Qing dynasty," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 36(3), pages 1657-1694, July.
    15. Papagni, Erasmo, 2018. "Fertility Transitions in Developing Countries: Convergence, Timing, and Causes," GLO Discussion Paper Series 248, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    16. Dahan, Momi & Tsiddon, Daniel, 1998. "Demographic Transition, Income Distribution, and Economic Growth," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 3(1), pages 29-52, March.
    17. Guinnane, Timothy W. & Moehling, Carolyn M. & O Grada, Cormac, 2006. "The fertility of the Irish in the United States in 1910," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 43(3), pages 465-485, July.
    18. Kiyosi Hirosima, 2010. "Another tempo distortion: analyzing controlled fertility by age-specific marital fertility rate," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2010-003, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    19. Oded Galor, 2012. "The demographic transition: causes and consequences," Cliometrica, Journal of Historical Economics and Econometric History, Association Française de Cliométrie (AFC), vol. 6(1), pages 1-28, January.
    20. Carl Schmertmann & Renato Assunção & Joseph Potter, 2010. "Knox meets Cox: Adapting epidemiological space-time statistics to demographic studies," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 47(3), pages 629-650, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Ireland; Fertility; Demography;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J1 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics
    • N3 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy

    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:egc:wpaper:838. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Benjamin King (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/egyalus.html .

    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.