ECONOMIC ASPECTS OF THE FERTILITY OF RURAL-FARM AND URBAN WOMEN.

This paper is an application of the economic theory of fertility formulated by Becker [1] and Mincer [9] to the fertility behavior of U. S. rural-farm women and to the differences between rural and urban fertility.
Though serious doubts have been raised about economic theories of fertility (most fundamentally whether fertility behavior is a matter of choice at all [3; 4]), this approach is useful in explaining cross-sectional differences in fertility. Although it cannot be claimed that the regression model used in this paper provides a completely specified aggregate fertility function, it does explain a substantial fraction of state variation in fertility, for both the rural-farm and urban populations. Of course, the model would not be expected to predict variations in fertility among individual families nearly so well; here randomly-distributed characteristics which cancel out in state aggregates would be much more important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]