Christelle Viauroux and Monika Acosta, Department of Economics

Between the latter nineteenth century and the 1930s there was a dramatic
revolution in American families. Family size continued its long-term
decline, the schooling of older children expanded and the proportion
of married females' adulthood devoted to market-oriented activities
increased. Over this same period there were significant reductions
in mortality, especially among the young, and impressive reductions
in morbidity. This paper considers all these trends jointly, modeling
the changes in fertility, child schooling and lifetime married female
labor supply as a consequence of exogenous changes in health. The project
aims at quantifying the results using data from IPUMS (Integrated Public
Use Microdata Series) using Panel data estimation techniques. Preliminary
calibrations show that reductions in child mortality alone cannot explain
the transformation of the American family. In sharp contrast, reductions
in morbidity are found to lower fertility and increase education.