Women’s Education and Childbearing

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Moshe Hazan and Hosny Zoabi write,

while highly educated women had fewer kids than women with lesser education in the US until the 1990s, it is no longer true today. During the 2000s, highly educated women had higher fertility rates than women with intermediate levels of education.

Their explanation:

childcare has become relatively more expensive for women with less than a college degree but relatively cheaper for women with a college or an advanced degree. Note that the changes are quantitatively large. Over the past three decades, the relative childcare cost has increased by 33%, 16% and 5% for women with no high-school diploma, a high-school degree and some college education, respectively. In contrast, this relative cost decreased by 9% for women with a college degree and by nearly 16% for women with an advanced degree.

Read the whole article. Pointer from Mark Thoma.

5 thoughts on “Women’s Education and Childbearing”

  1. Long term Bryan Caplan is not going to like this reality and the developed world is moving closer to the Singapore Solution which the best way to lower poverty is make having multiple children too expensive. (Matt Yglesias pointed this reality is one reason for declined income migration as well.) I bet if you took out recent immigrants to the US, the study would show even a larger impact of this change.

    Outside of Israel, is there a very competitive nation that has a above replacement fertility rate? (I assume Israel has a high birth rate due to being in a Cold War and they have demographic battles getting more dangerous.)

  2. I just wish writers would use clearer definitions. I cannot figure out–without reading the entire article–what they mean by “relative childcare cost.” I’m sure there is a way to write it using plain concepts.

    • Upper Middle Class women make more relative to their imported hispanic nannies. The hourly wage differential is a lot higher then in the past when there was a strong middle class and women wouldn’t leave their own children in mass daycare to raise the children of the wealthy for peanuts.

      • P.S. The same language could describe the entire fertility industry, in which poor desperate women rent out their wombs to rich women.

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