Did Rising Out-Migration Cause Fertility to Decline in Antebellum New England? A Life-Cycle Perspective on Old-Age Security Motives, Child Default, and Farm-Family Fertility

Abstract

A model of fertility based on the life-cycle model of intertemporal optimization is presented in which fertility, children's schooling, saving, and bequest planning are simultaneously determined. The paper hypothesizes that sometime shortly after the beginning of the nineteenth century, Americans began to adopt this life-cycle strategy and abandon the older, traditional family-based system of providing for old age. As a consequence the overall fertility rate began to fall. The change in attitudes was, it is argued, triggered by the high incidence of 'child default' as young adults left the seaboard states for land in the west. The change to life-cycle strategies was gradual and proceeded at different rates in different parts of the country. This differential timing of the 'life-cycle transition' allows empirical tests to be based on cross-sections of state data drawn from the 1840 U.S. Census. The model is shown to predict well. An alternative hypothesis, Richard Easterlin's 'target-bequest model' is rejected by these tests.