Human Capital and Fertility in Chinese Clans Before Modern Growth
研究13至19世纪中国安徽宗族家庭在工业化前生育率下降的现象，发现高收入家庭孩子更少但教育投入更多，教育投资与孩子数量负相关，且人力资本需求随时间下降，可能解释中国早期未能工业化。
This paper studies the pre-industrial origins of modern-day fertility decline. The setting is in Anhwei Province, China over the 13th to 19th centuries, a period well before the onset of China’s demographic transition and industrialization. There are four main results. First, we observe non-Malthusian effects in which high income households had relatively fewer children. Second, higher income households had relatively more educated sons, consistent with their greater ability to support major educational investments. Third, those households that invested in education had fewer children, suggesting that households producing educated children were reallocating resources away from child quantity and towards child quality. Fourth, over time, demand for human capital fell significantly. The most plausible reason is the declining returns to educational investments. The findings point to a role for demography in explaining China’s failure to industrialize early on.