Marital Fertility, Wealth and Inequality in

The Demographic Transition enabled the productivity advances of the Industrial Revolution to be channelled into higher living standards and modern economic growth. The fertility revolution was central to this great transformation. Fertility declined in France a century before anywhere else in Europe. The question as to why France was first has never been convincingly answered. This paper analyses the relationship between wealth and fertility at the individual level for transition era France (1750-1850). The analysis is split into two components. Firstly, the wealth-fertility relationship is described: Demographic data from the Enquete Henry is linked to wealth at death data from the Tables des Succsessions et Absensces for four villages in the 19th century. There has been no previous study of the relationship between wealth and fertility during the period of fertility decline in France. The results show clear socioeconomic differences with respect to family size during this era. The wealth-fertility relationship is positive pre–transition but then turns sharply negative, strongly suggesting that fertility decline is differentiated by socioeconomic strata. Secondly, explanations and theories for the fertility transition and the Wealth-Fertility relationship are tested with the new database. Previous economic explanations for the fertility transition have been undermined by the results of large empirical studies such as the European Fertility Project (other wise known as the Princeton Project). However, the idea that parents are motivated by relative social status concerns and adjust their fertility accordingly has never been tested for explicitly. I test my data for measures of wealth inequality, which I argue reflect parent’s perceptions of the possibilities for social advancement. Movements in economic inequality may therefore impact on parent’s fertility decisions, if these changes make relative social advancement appear more possible. The preliminary results indicate that measures of economic inequality have a strong and significant correlation with fertility levels.