Fertility Responses to Expectations of Child Mortality in a Tuscan Village 1700-1913: A Micro-Data Approach

This paper exploits microdata from parish registers in a rural Tuscan village to trace the relationship between experienced and expected child mortality on household fertility strategies. It turns out that spacing of births and hence completed fertility are not only linked to economic risks and infant mortality but also to expected mortality risks as proxied by past child mortality in the village and in previous generations. The results indicate that before the demographic transition households made sequential fertility choices within marriage as a response to economic shocks as well as expected child mortality.