An Investigation of the Relation between the number of Children and Education in Italy

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of the level of education on the number of children in Italy. To this end, we select 2,088 families from the Longitudinal Investigation on Italian Families (ILFI) dataset. We consider two instruments based on a mandatory schooling reform introduced in Italy in 1963. The contribution to the existing literature is twofold: first, we do not consider the woman’s education but we examine how different combination of spouses’ educational levels may affect their fertility rate; second, we investigate the extent to which the impact of education on fertility is intensified by both the postponement problem and the opportunity cost of having children