This chapter reviews the literature on the causal effects of policies on fertility. It focuses on evidence from experiments and quasi-experiments in low fertility contexts, including studies from Europe, Northern America, Oceania and Asia. Making no a priori restrictions on policy type, the...

While fertility is positively correlated across generations, the causal effect of children's experience with larger sibships on their own fertility in adulthood is poorly understood. Using the sex composition of the two first-born children as an instrumental variable, we estimate the effect of...

This study describes the association between having children and the risk of union disruption, and whether this association has changed over time. We expand upon previous research by including data on cohabiting as well as married couples, and by studying change over four decades. We use data...

The relationship between income, cost of childrearing and fertility is of considerable political and theoretical interest. We utilize exogenous variation in family income and the direct cost of children to estimate causal effects on fertility. The variation comes from a regional child benefit...

Fertility contagion through social networks increasingly attracts the interest of demographers. While these theories propose a causal mechanism, they are rarely put to test in a plausibly causal statistical design. This study applies quasi-experimental techniques to distinguish network effects...

While fertility is positively correlated across generations, the causal effect of children's experience with larger sibships on their own fertility in adulthood is poorly understood. Using the sex composition of the two first-born children as an instrumental variable, we estimate the effect of...