Education and the Derived Demand for Children

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A negative correlation across households between parent's education and completed fertility is one of the most widely and frequently observed relationships in the empirical literature on human fertility behavior. In this paper I utilize the emerging economic theory of household behavior, which is also employed in other papers in this Supplement, to formulate an explanation for this observed negative correlation. In particular, the paper has two objectives: (1) to consider the mechanisms through which a couple's level of education might affect their fertility and (2) to document the effects of education on one of these mechanisms that is an aspect of fertility control-the choice of a contraceptive technique. The following section briefly outlines the theoretical framework, and in Section III I discuss the mechanisms through which education's influence may operate. Throughout, the discussion is restricted to channels of influence from education to fertility; that is, the reverse causation is ruled out by assumption. The specific focus of this discussion should not be interpreted as an assertion of the exclusiveness or the primacy of education's influence on fertility. Section IV considers the fertility-control decision in greater detail. It also reports on my initial empirical work with the 1965 National Fertility Study, a nationwide sociological survey of 5,600 U.S. women undertaken by the Office of Population Research at