Effects of the Great Recession and its Aftermath on U.S. Fertility - PROJECT SUMMARY This R03 will conduct secondary data analyses that will identify the causal effect of the Great Recession (GR) and its aftermath on the fertility of successive birth cohorts of U.S. women. Our causal identification strategy will employ a strikingly simple but rarely used cohort discontinuity design. This strategy relies on comparisons of births to women in adjacent birth cohorts, thus comparing, for example, births at age 25 that were conceived during the GR among the cohort of women born in calendar year t (“treatment”) to births at age 25 that were conceived just before the GR among the cohort of women born in calendar year t 1 (“controls”). Our analyses will exploit the extremely large number and near-universal coverage of the more than 131 million births available in U.S. natality microdata. Preliminary results, presented below, suggest strikingly heterogeneous effects of the GR by age and cohort, with (1) little effect of the GR for the youngest and oldest cohorts of U.S. women, but (2) negative effects of between 0.010 to 0.017 fewer births per woman for cohorts of U.S. women who were born between 1980 and 1990 and who were thus between the ages of 19 and 29 during the GR. These preliminary findings motivate our Aim 2 analyses of fertility in the aftermath of the GR—for example, whether the initial negative but small effects of the GR merely delayed childbearing or instead resulted in small but continuing decreases in the years following the GR. These “recuperation” analyses will again employ a cohort discontinuity design contrasting the post-GR fertility of “treated” and “control” birth cohorts of U.S. women. Our identification strategy differs from that used in previous research, with the vast majority of such studies identifying the effect of the business cycle on fertility using exogenous variation in unemployment or other economic indicators often pooled across multiple recessionary and non-recessionary periods. Our strategy, by contrast, can be used to identify effects specific to a particular recession, which may be especially relevant in the case of the GR, given its duration and severity. We will estimate the effect of the GR and its aftermath at aggregate, state, and county levels of analysis. Findings from these analyses will speak to a variety of questions such as: (1) whether the GR had more negative effects at particular ages or for particular race and ethnic groups; (2) whether fertility “recuperation” was more likely in states and counties that rebounded more quickly in the period following the GR; or (3) if the GR might have initiated a continuing decline in fertility for particular cohorts, demographic groups, or localities.
