Abstract
Exploiting a genealogy of English individuals living in the 16th to the 19th centuries, this study shows that lower parental reproductive capacity positively affected the socio-economic achievements of offspring. Using the time interval between the date of marriage and the first birth as a measure of reproductive capacity, we find that parental fecundity positively affected the number of siblings and that children of parents with lower fecundity were more likely to become literate and employed in skilled and high-income professions. This suggests there was a trade-off between child quantity and quality in England during the industrial revolution, supporting leading theories of the origins of modern economic growth.
Highlights
Data and Main VariablesOur empirical investigation exploits information on individuals from a sample of 26 English parishes
Introduction to the Empirical StrategyThe identification of a causal effect of parental fertility on the human capital of children is affected by two potential econometric issues: omitted variable bias and reverse causality
Where hij is a measure of the human capital of individual i in family j; sij is the predicted number of siblings of individual i in family j resulting from the estimation of (2); aij is a vector of individual-level control variables; bj is a vector of family and parish-level control variables for family j; and νij is an error term that is correlated within families
Summary
Our empirical investigation exploits information on individuals from a sample of 26 English parishes. The information was originally recorded in English church books for the period 1541–871. It was later transcribed by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure as documented in Wrigley et al (1997).. The parishes were selected by the Cambridge Group on merit of data quality and have been shown to represent England as whole rather well (Wrigley et al, 1997, 41ff). Individuals, the data frequently contains information on occupation and literacy status, which we explore below.
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