Delay in Childbearing and the Evolution of Fertility Rates.

During the last four decades, researchers have observed an increase of the mean age at birth in developed economies (e.g., Frejka and Sardon, 2006). Despite the plethora of studies that incorporate endogenous fertility in models of economic growth (e.g., Galor and Weil, 2000; Blackburn and Cipriani, 2002; de la Croix and Doepke, 2009; Vogl, 2016; Strulik, 2017; Futagami and Konishi, 2019), only a limited number have explicitly considered issues pertaining to the timing of childbearing (Iyigun, 2000; Momota and Horii, 2013; d'Albis et al., 2018). In this paper, we present a growth model whose novelty is to explicitly account for the direct, preference-related factors that reinforce the delay in the timing of childbearing. We show that an intermediate stage of demographic change in a developed economy, where cohort fertility actually recuperates, emerges if and only if this preferencerelated factor contributes to the postponement of parenthood. This outcome is consistent with existing views and evidence that link the recuperation of fertility rates to culturally-induced changes that directly affect people's preferences (e.g., Arpino et al., 2015; Esping-Andersen and Billari, 2015; Feichtinger et al., 2017; Beaujouan, 2020). Nonetheless, the model also shows that the trend reversal from declining to increasing cohort fertility is followed by yet another reversal towards once more decreasing fertility rates. This latest phase of demographic change will eventually lead to a cohort fertility that is even lower compared to the one that marked the onset of the fertility rate's recuperation. This outcome has major policy implications: It implies that, even when the rebound the fertility is a true change in demographic trends, it is still a temporary one. Furthermore, the quantitative analysis of our results verifies that our model provides a good fit for actual data of the rebound of the completed cohort fertility rates in Nordic countries. The fact that these countries are widely considered as the most progressive ones, in terms of their cultural norms and in terms of their family-oriented policies, offers credence to the hypothesis that our model advances. More generally, our framework provides a platform for research that can uncover empirically relevant, but yet unexplored, mechanisms in the joint analysis of demographic change and economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]