Study on fertility consequences of WWII by Esmée Zwiers in the Journal of Labor Economics
The paper ‘Estimating the Lifecycle Fertility Consequences of WWII Using Bunching' by research fellow and alumna Esmée Zwiers (University of Amsterdam is forthcoming in the Journal of Labor Economics. Esmée initially wrote the research paper as her job market paper.
In the paper, Esmée studies the baby boom that followed WWII and the 1930s baby bust. Using conventional demographic measures, it is unclear if the war shifted the timing of fertility or changed women’s completed fertility. She disaggregates the number of births by age for cohorts of mothers, and estimates counterfactual distributions of births by exploiting that women experienced the war at different ages in a bunching methodology. The results show that the fertility rise after WWII did not compensate for missed births that did not occur before the war. Finally, she shows that Easterlin’s relative income hypothesis cannot explain the Dutch post-WWII baby boom.
Article citation
Esmée Zwiers, ‘Estimating the Lifecycle Fertility Consequences of WWII Using Bunching'', Journal of Labor Economics, forthcoming, doi.org/10.1086/739203