Jacob Rose
Research Topic
England’s fertility decline: A new exploration using digitised individual census
records, 1861-1921.
Supervisor: Sian Pooley and Jane Humphries
My research explores why and how fertility rates decline rapidly after modern economic growth begins. Many perspectives in the field are buttressed by macroeconomic models which rely on aggregate data, often yielding results which contain ecological biases, flawed assumptions behind first-order conditions, or problems with the direction of causality. Despite this, economists often do not explore the socio-economic and cultural historical records required to disaggregate their data, and improve these noisy or implausible models. I hope to help remedy this, not least because I believe economists and historical demographers actually stand to gain a lot by working with each other's ideas and methods. I use British census microdata for the period 1851-1921 and archival resources in local areas to examine the relationship between fertility decline and the expansion of education, a force which economists have long pinned as the cause of modern economic and demographic change.
I am primarily interested in three questions. Was there a causal relationship between more schooling and a reduction in fertility? If there was, how did gender, occupation, and place structure the effect? And above all else - what do national and local empirical sources suggest was the plausible mechanism?
It is unsatisfying to paint historical epochs with reductive and broad brush strokes, and suggest that greater returns to human capital incentivised a reduction in child numbers, or claim that education gave women greater bargaining power over their husbands. It is more useful to imagine the individual, and try and understand why girls and boys learning the 'Three Rs' in disciplined classrooms would go on to enter partnerships which radically changed their sexual behaviour compared to that of their parents. This is what drives my research.
Funded by ESRC and St John's College.
