More Schooling, More Children: Compulsory Schooling Reforms and Fertility in Europe

We study the relationship between education and fertility, ex-ploiting compulsory schooling reforms in Europe as source of exogenous variation in education. Using data from 8 European countries, we assess the causal effect of education on the num-ber of biological kids and the incidence of childlessness. We find that more education causes a substantial decrease in child-lessness and an increase in the average number of children per woman. Our findings are robust to a number of falsification checks and we can provide complementary empirical evidence on the mechanisms leading to these surprising results