Research in Economic History

Christopher Hanes, Susan Wolcott, Christopher Hanes, Susan Wolcott

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800718814
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

In this 37th volume of Research in Economic History, editors Christopher Hanes and Susan Wolcott assemble a group of lead experts to showcase new historical data, analyses of historical questions, and an investigation of historians' networks.

The volume covers a wide range of ideas, beginning with an examination of the sharp decline in school attendance among white children in the Southern US after the Civil War, followed by a study on the fiscal administration of an experimental parliamentary subsidy on English knight's fees and income from 1431. A third paper assembles new county-level, household-level, and individual-level data, including new complete-count IPUMS microdata databases of the 1830-1880 censuses, to evaluate different theories for the nineteenth-century American fertility decline.

The volume then pivots to deal with the development of banking in the Crown of Aragon from the end of the 13th century through the establishment of money changers. Finally, the volume summarizes in detail the content of Pieter Stadnitski's revolutionary 1787 report An Explanatory Message Concerning the Funds, analyzing its arguments with the context of Dutch archival materials including deeds, newspaper reports, and letters, as well as congressional records from American sources.

This new volume presents fascinating new areas of enquiry and analysis for all scholars in the field of economic history, including economists, historians and demographers.

Early Fertility Decline in the United States: Tests of Alternative Hypotheses Using New Complete-Count Census Microdata and Enhanced County-Level Data

J. David Hacker, Michael R. Haines and Matthew Jaremski

Abstract

The US fertility transition in the nineteenth century is unusual. Not only did it start from a very high fertility level and very early in the nation’s development, but it also took place long before the nation’s mortality transition, industrialization, and urbanization. This paper assembles new county-level, household-level, and individual-level data, including new complete-count IPUMS microdata databases of the 1830–1880 censuses, to evaluate different theories for the nineteenth-century American fertility transition. We construct cross-sectional models of net fertility for currently-married white couples in census years 1830–1880 and test the results with a subset of couples linked between the 1850–1860, 1860–1870, and 1870–1880 censuses. We find evidence of marital fertility control consistent with hypotheses as early as 1830. The results indicate support for several different but complementary theories of the early US fertility decline, including the land availability, conventional structuralist, ideational, child demand/quality-quantity tradeoff, and life cycle savings theories.

Keywords: Fertility transition; life cycle savings model; IPUMS; banking; nineteenth-century US; demand for children

JEL Classification: J13; N21; N31

1 Introduction

The fertility transition in the nineteenth-century United States is unusual in a number of respects. The decline comes very early in the nation’s development. Between 1800 and 1880, the white population’s crude birth rate fell from about 55 to 35 and its total fertility rate fell from about 7.0 to 4.2. In contrast, fertility decline in most western and northern European countries did not commence until circa 1880 (Coale & Watkins, 1986). Only France had a comparably early onset of the transition. The US fertility transition also began long before the sustained decline in mortality, which commenced in the 1870s (Haines, 1989, 2000). Finally, the transition occurred when the nation was still predominantly agrarian and rural, although the decline in birth rates happened in both rural and urban places. Even in 1880, only about 28% of the US population lived in urban areas (defined by the Census as places with over 2,500 people) and 52% of the labor force derived its primary support from non-agricultural activity (Carter et al., 2006, Series Ba829-830; Haines & Steckel, 2000, Table 8.1).

This article sheds new light on the nineteenth-century fertility transition in the United States by examining correlates of net marital fertility across the period 1830–1880. We rely on several new data sources, including complete-count IPUMS datasets of the 1830, 1840, 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, which document the recent fertility of more than 11 million currently-married white women (Ruggles et al., 2020), and new and enhanced county-level data, which provide important contextual information, including local farm prices, land availability, manufacturing activity, transportation links, and banks. These data allow us to take a more comprehensive and detailed look at the fertility transition than previously possible while minimizing omitted variable biases inherent in studies focused on a single or small number of explanatory variables. We examine a number of competing, but possibly complementary, explanations for the fertility decline, including the land availability, child demand, life cycle transition, local labor market/child default, and ideational hypotheses, as well as the conventional structuralist explanation associated with classic demographic transition theory.

Despite the large number of cases and variables available in the combined datasets, the data used in this study – like the vast majority of historical data – have limitations. Given these limitations, we do not attempt to estimate causal relationships. The datasets assembled here, nonetheless, represent a substantial improvement in quantity, quality, and coverage relative to data used by earlier researchers. The individual-level data allow us to model marital fertility, eliminating the ambiguity in many previous studies as to whether the mechanism linking independent variables to fertility was via changes in the timing and incidence of marriage (a Malthusian adjustment) or via changes in childbearing by married couples (a neo-Malthusian adjustment). We employ state-level fixed effects to control for unobserved spatial heterogeneity and control for a wide variety of economic, demographic, and cultural factors to minimize ecological and other types of bias. We also test our results with a subset of couples linked between the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses using preliminary census “crosswalks” recently published by Abramitzky, Boustan, and Rashid (2020). Although these links are preliminary and subject to potential errors, the results of conditional change models constructed with these longitudinal data – which minimize the potential for endogeneity to bias the results by including couples’ prior fertility as an independent variable on the right-hand side of the regression – largely confirm the findings from the cross-sectional analysis, increasing confidence in the results.

2 Background and Prior Studies

A national birth registration system was not started in the United States until 1915 and not completed until 1933 (Haines, 1989). Broad patterns of the nineteenth-century fertility transition, however, are evident in the ratio of the number of children to the number of women of childbearing age reported by decennial censuses. As shown in Fig. 1, the nation’s child-woman ratio (CWR) declined 33% between 1800 and 1880. CWRs in urban areas were much lower than CWRs in rural areas in all census years, but urban and rural places experienced similar declines from early in the century. New England was the region with the lowest CWRs in each census year and experienced a decline of more than 50% over the 80-year period. CWRs were lower in eastern census regions and higher in western regions, and, to a lesser extent, lower in northern census regions than in southern census regions. ¹

Fig. 1. White Woman-Child Ratios in the United States, 1800–1880.

The child-woman ratios shown in Fig. 1 suggest that fertility rates in the United States at the start of the nineteenth century were high relative to fertility rates in other English-speaking countries. Ansley Coale and Melvin Zelnik estimated that white women surviving their childbearing years in 1800 gave birth to an average of 7.0 children, about 1.6 more children than estimated by historical demographers for women in England and Wales. By 1880, total fertility in the United States had fallen to 4.2, about 0.5 fewer children than in England and Wales (Coale & Zelnik, 1963; Woods, 2000). Thus, despite a delayed onset of the industrial revolution relative to England and Wales, the United States experienced an earlier onset of the fertility transition.

Explicitly or implicitly, most contemporary observers associated high fertility in the early United States with early and near universal marriage, which was in turn seen as a product of the nation’s inexpensive land, abundant resources, and high standard of living. Benjamin Franklin was the first to point out the association of land availability, early marriage, and high fertility:

Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry; for if they even look far enough forward to consider how their Children when grown up are to be provided for, they see that more Land is to be had a Rates equally easy, all Circumstances considered …. Hence Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe. (Quoted in McCusker & Menard, 1985, p. 212)

With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the defeat of Indian confederations in the War of 1812, and the opening of the trans-Appalachian west, land availability may have been near an all-time high in the early nineteenth century. Thereafter, increasing population densities, declining land availability, and rising farm prices – especially in more densely populated areas near the Atlantic coast and navigable waterways – resulted in a trend toward later marriage, higher proportions who never married, and lower fertility. Imbalanced sex ratios (men outnumbered women in western frontier regions, while women outnumbered men in eastern regions) also contributed to regional differentials in nuptiality and fertility (Haines & Hacker, 2011). In an early statistical analysis of the 1790–1840 censuses, George Tucker (1855) confirmed a long-term decline in the ratio of children to women in every state between 1800 and 1840 and an inverse relationship between state child-woman ratios and population densities (pp. 104–106).

To the extent that the fertility decline was caused by chan...