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Fertility and the Price of Children: Evidence from Slavery and Slave Emancipation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2014

Marianne H. Wanamaker
Marianne H. Wanamaker*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, The University of Tennessee, 524 Stokely Management Center, Knoxville, TN 37996. E-mail: wanamaker@utk.edu.
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Abstract

Theories of the demographic transition often center on the rising price of children. A model of fertility derived from household production in the antebellum United States contains both own children and slaves as inputs. Changes in slaveholdings beget changes in the marginal product of the slaveowners’ own children and, hence, their price. I use panel data on slaveowning households between 1850 and 1870 to measure the slaveowners’ own fertility responses to exogenous changes in slaveholdings. Results indicate a strong, negative correlation between own child prices and fertility.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 74 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 1045 - 1071
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2014 

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Footnotes

Many thanks to Raquel Bernal, Hoyt Bleakley, Lou Cain, Celeste Carruthers, Joseph Ferrie, Mark Guglielmo, Tim Guinnane, Charles Manski, Robert Margo, Joel Mokyr, John Parman, Paul Rhode, Chris Taber, and anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. Comments from participants at the Northwestern University Economic History Seminar, Northwestern Labor Lunch and the University of Chicago Center for Population Economics Workshop on Economics and Biodemography of Aging and Health Care are gratefully acknowledged. In addition, I thank The Graduate School at Northwestern University for funding this research.

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