Behind the fertility–education nexus: what triggered the French development process?
利用法国县级数据，研究19世纪教育对生育率的因果影响，发现生育率下降与教育普及密切相关，并强调性别平等和家庭组织的作用。
The education-fertility relationship is a central element of the models explaining the transition to sustained economic growth. But many determinants of this relationship have not yet received more systematic attention. In this paper, we apply a three-stages leastsquares estimator on French county-level data, including newly collected data, to better understand the causal effects running from education to fertility, and vice versa. We put forward the hypothesis that a decrease in fertility was strongly associated with greater schooling in France during the nineteenth century. Besides, we emphasize the relevance of taking account of gender equality and family organization when explaining the education-fertility relationship.