Michèle Tertilt

Polygyny, Fertility, and Savings

Sub‐Saharan Africa has a high incidence of polygyny. It is also the poorest region of the world. In this paper I ask whether banning polygyny could play any role for development. Using a quantitative model of polygyny, I find that enforcing monogamy lowers fertility, shrinks the spousal age gap, and reverses the direction of marriage payments. Polygyny leads to high bride‐prices to “ration” women, which makes buying wives and selling daughters a good investment, thus crowding out investment in physical assets. For reasonable parameter values, I find that banning polygyny decreases fertility by 40 percent, increases savings by 70 percent, and increases output per capita by 170 percent.

Chapter 5 An Economic History of Fertility in the United States: 1826–1960

In this paper, we use data from the US census to document the history of the relationship between fertility choice and key economic indicators at the individual level for women born between 1826 and 1960. We find that this data suggests several new facts that should be useful for researchers trying to model fertility. (1) The reduction in fertility known as the Demographic Transition (or the Fertility Transition) seems to be much sharper based on cohort fertility measures compared to usual measures like Total Fertility Rate; (2) The baby boom was not quite as large as is suggested by some previous work; (3) We find a strong negative relationship between income and fertility for all cohorts and estimate an overall income elasticity of about −0.38 for the period; (4) We also find systematic deviations from a time invariant, iso-elastic, relationship between income and fertility. The most interesting of these is an increase in the income elasticity of demand for children for the 1876–1880 to 1906–1910 birth cohorts. This implies an increased spread in fertility by income which was followed by a dramatic compression.

Property rights and efficiency in OLG models with endogenous fertility

Is there an economic rationale for pronatalist policies? We propose and analyze a particular market failure that leads to inefficiently low fertility in equilibrium. The friction is caused by the lack of ownership of children: if parents have no claim on their children’s income, the private benefit from producing a child can be smaller than the social benefit. We analyze an overlapping-generations model with fertility choice and parental altruism. Ownership is modeled as a minimum constraint on transfers from parents to children. Using the efficiency concepts proposed in Golosov, Jones, and Tertilt (2007), we find that whenever the transfer floor is binding, fertility choices are inefficient. Second, we show that the usual conditions for efficiency are not sufficient in this context. Third, in contrast to settings with exogenous fertility, a PAYG social security system cannot be used to implement efficient allocations. To achieve an efficient outcome, government transfers need to be tied to fertility choice.

Marriage Laws and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

Many Sub-Saharan African countries are extremely poor. It has been argued that the marriage system – in particular polygyny – is one contributing factor to the lack of development in this region. Polygyny leads to low incentives to save, depressing the capital stock and output. Enforcing monogamy might seem like an obvious solution. However, such a law will have winners and losers. In this paper, we investigate the transition from a polygynous to a monogamous steady state. We find that the initial old men will be big losers. The reason is that they had married many wives in anticipation of the brideprice that future daughters will fetch. However, due to the marriage reform, the value of daughters depreciates rapidly, as the brideprice changes from positive to negative. This increases savings and thereby the aggregate capital stock. The interest rate falls and the initial young suffer a loss in capital income. Thus, all men alive during the reform period experience a loss in utility. Young women and all future generations will benefit. However, the future gains are not enough to compensate the losers. This may explain why many African countries experience strong resistance to changing their marriage laws.

IPUMS-CPS: An Integrated Version of the March Current Population Survey, 1962–2002

Abstract The Minnesota Population Center (MPC) is creating an integrated version of the March U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS) covering the years 1962–2002. The CPS is one of the few comprehensive data sources available for researching social and economic trends between decennial censuses. The survey also includes useful information—such as employment patterns and participation in social welfare programs—that is not available in the census. The new database will be compatible with the decennial census data available in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). For variables found in both sources, the integrated CPS will use IPUMS codes, and the documentation and data access system for the CPS data will be based on IPUMS principles and infrastructure.

The Association Between Own Unemployment and Violence Victimization Among Female Youths

Summary We estimate the association between the unemployment status of young women and the probability that they are subject to violence, using Swedish population register data covering the period 1999-2008. These data contain the highest-level classification of diagnoses made by medical experts at every individual in-patient and out-patient visit to medical care units, including every contact with a physician. We distinguish between domestic and non-domestic violence. It turns out that unemployed women are significantly more likely to be victimized than employed women with the same individual characteristics. This is mostly reflected in indicators of nondomestic violence and long-run abuse among unemployed female youths.