Industrialization and Fertility in the Nineteenth Century: Evidence from South Carolina

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: University of Tennessee System; University of Tennessee Knoxville
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0507
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022050711002476
• 发表日期: 2012
• 页码: 168-196
• 关键词: farm family fertility; UNITED-STATES; ECONOMIC-GROWTH; child-mortality; TRANSITION; decline; LABOR; population; differentials; marriage

摘要

Economists frequently hypothesize that industrialization contributed to the United States' nineteenth-century fertility decline. I exploit the circumstances surrounding industrialization in South Carolina between 1881 and 1900 to show that the establishment of textile mills coincided with a 6-10 percent fertility reduction. Migrating households are responsible for most of the observed decline. Higher rates of textile employment and child mortality for migrants can explain part of the result, and I conjecture that an increase in child-raising costs induced by the separation of migrant households from their extended families may explain the remaining gap in migrant-native fertility.