Do Egalitarian Societies Boost Fertility?

In general, the spreading of egalitarian family values has often been associated with adecline in fertility. However, recently a rebound in fertility has been observed in severalindustrialized countries. A possible explanation of this trend may be the spread ofegalitarian values that induced institutional changes - such as expansion of child carefacilities and father leave – fostering the combination of parenthood and the egalitarianlifestyle. In our paper we build up a formal model to study the diffusion from traditional toegalitarian gender-behavior and its impact on fertility. We find that the long-rundevelopment of the total fertility within a population not only depends on the pace ofdiffusion of egalitarianism and the extent to which social interactions affect theegalitarians’ birth rates, but also on the initial number of traditionalists and egalitarians.We show under which conditions a fertility decline is followed by a subsequent recovery