The Economics of Childlessness

Rising childlessness is now a central margin of very low fertility in middle- and high-income countries, where delayed entry into parenthood increasingly risks becoming permanent non-parenthood. Because completed cohort childlessness can only be observed at the end of reproductive life, this chapter develops a period measure of childlessness, analogous to the Total Fertility Rate, that summarizes the age-specific first-birth conditions prevailing in a given year. Applied to the countries for which the measure can be computed, period childlessness has risen everywhere, reaching around one quarter in several Western countries, more than one third in Finland, Japan, and Spain, and 45% in South Korea. To interpret these patterns, the chapter proposes a conceptual framework that moves beyond the conventional distinction between voluntary and involuntary childlessness, distinguishing instead between biological, poverty-driven, opportunity-driven, marriage-market, and mortality-driven routes to non-parenthood. The rise in childlessness is then interpreted through a model in which partnership formation and fertility are jointly determined. We map leading explanations for rising childlessness into this unified framework, showing how declining partnership surplus, housing costs, gendered child-rearing norms, weaker pro-natalist preferences, and uncertainty affect childlessness through model primitives.