The Emergence of the Child Quantity-Quality Tradeoff - insights from early modern academics

Abstract Consider the transition out of a stagnant Malthusian system spearheaded by high-human-capital people. Individuals with a stronger preference for offspring quality may be the first to escape the Malthusian regime and adopt modern fertility behaviours (Galor and Moav 2002). To test this hypothesis, we examine the relationship between family size and human capital among academics in Northern Europe in the two centuries before the Industrial Revolution. We measure the human capital of academics using a novel approach based on their publications. We find that scholars with a higher number of publications than the median shifted from having more siblings to having fewer siblings in the first half of the 18th century. Estimating the parameters of an evolutionary growth model by indirect inference, we show how Malthusian constraints initially led the high human capital families to reproduce more, before being endogenously replaced by Beckerian constraints with a tradeoff between child quality and quantity. Our results support an extension of Galor and Moav’s (2002) approach, in which the decline of Malthusian constraints is linked to the accumulation of human capital during the 18th century.